“To deliver the one-two punch,” the robotics engineer finished. “Yeah. That’ll work. But you—”
He stood. “I’ll be fine. Euge, Mini, you ready to go?”
Euge nodded and Mini said, “Ready as we’ll ever be. I feel sort of useless just acting as a courier. I wish I could be here in case something goes wrong early on. I’m pretty good at providing distraction.” She shot Eugene a sidewise grin, which caused him to blush profusely.
He cleared his throat. “I, on the other hand, am just useless. I’m lucky I qualify for courier.”
Mini punched his shoulder. “Shut up and let’s go take a walk in the woods.”
Chuck walked several paces behind Eugene and Mini on the short hike through the forest. They held hands and walked with their heads tilted toward each other just like any young lovers. It made Chuck simultaneously happy and sorrowful. Happy because they were capable of shutting out the dire nature of their situation momentarily, and sorrowful because they were not like any young lovers and possibly never could be.
At the government camp, Chuck went directly to the communications center and contacted Sara. She was surprised by his change of mind.
“I don’t get it. I thought you had claustrophobia.” She peered at him out of the flat display, trying to read his expression.
He chuckled ruefully and scratched behind one ear. “Yeah. Something I developed after months of being cooped up in an underground lab. But after being out in nature for a while, the thought of going back underground isn’t quite so terrifying. Besides, I’d really like to see what you’ve done with the place. I couldn’t help but notice the observation deck you built at the summit.”
She brightened; she seemed pleased. “You know it’s always boggled my mind that you and Streegman would end up partners in anything. You were like the odd couple of science. You’re so unlike him. He was always quick to criticize and had no appreciation for the subtleties of the human spirit. You’re not like that, which is why you’re welcome here. I’ll have Mike send down an escort.”
“Great. And if Tim’s ready for his checkup, you can send him down to our base camp. We’ve got all the equipment set up over there and Dice is ready to take some baseline measures. I’m willing to bet you guys are off the charts when it comes to sheer output. I can hardly wait to see the zeta plots.”
“Oh, we’re off the charts all right. You said you thought Tim and Lanfen were equivalent. Did you really mean that?”
She glanced to one side; Chuck suspected that meant Tim was in the room with her—had maybe prompted her to ask that question. Good. Tim’s hypercompetitive nature was something they were banking on.
“Their talents lie in different areas, though they overlap. Frankly, in some ways Lanfen is a better match for Mike in terms of how she uses her abilities. What I mainly want to see is if they’re working in the same wave range. Eventually, I hope to get benchmarks on everyone so we can see just how far we can go with this.”
Tim stuck his head into the frame, grinning. “Oh, sky’s the limit, Doc. Sky’s the limit.”
Chuck smiled in return, but there was no joy in it. He went out to the western perimeter of the camp to wait for his escort.
Tim arrived at Beta Camp in the company of two of his gargoyle constructs. Brenda, who hadn’t seen them before, let out a yip of fear, but Dice and Lanfen had some idea of what to expect and tried to calm her down.
“They’re just illusions,” Lanfen told Bren quietly as Dice strode out to meet Tim. “Remember? They aren’t quite as solid as they look. If you tossed a Ping-Pong ball it might bounce off, but it can’t hurt you.”
“Easy for you to say,” Bren growled.
Lanfen bit her lip and watched Dice pump Tim’s hand and admire the gargoyles. It wasn’t as easy for either of them as Bren supposed.
“Hey, Tim! I like your sidekicks, dude. Very effective. Their drool sort of disappears before it hits the ground, though.”
“Yeah, well, I bet it’s more than anyone else can do.” Glancing at Lanfen. “Am I right? Hey, Bren. Hey, Lanfen,” he added, waving.
The gargoyles waved with him. Interesting.
“Yeah,” Dice said. “It takes me weeks to perfect my bots; you’ve got instant minions. Must be nice to be a Zeta I guess.” He glanced back at the women, who both gave him raised eyebrows. He’d already showed off enough to suitably impress Brenda with exactly what he could do with anything that generated energy pulses. Lanfen knew he wasn’t about to let Tim in on his secret talents.
Tim did a lazy 360, taking in the spartan, woodsy environs in which they’d set up their two modular metal cabins and their wood-framed winter tent and the two SUVs parked in the shade of a colossal red cedar.
“I gotta say, this place is a dump. I mean, compared to our digs. You live like hermits. We live like kings. Like gods. Join up with us and you could live like gods, too.”
Dice snorted. “Yeah, you know, I’ve been to Deepshieldia. I didn’t think it was all that great.”
“That was before we redesigned it. Or at least the parts we use. We’ve got a construction engineer on our team, remember? An engineer who can build things with his mind.” He made a magicky finger waggle at his head. “It’s awesome. You’ve got glorified toolsheds; we’ve got a domain.”
“Denizens of the underworld, huh?” said Bren, digging her hands into the pockets of her jacket. Lanfen could tell they were clenched. “So which one of you is Hades? And does that make Sara Persephone?”
Tim looked at her quizzically. “Huh. I never thought of that. I prefer to think of it as Moria. Peopled by dwarves and hobbitses and . . .”
“And Gollum?” asked Bren, drawing a startled glance from both Dice and Lanfen.
“I was going to say, and greater beings such as Maiar and Valar.”
“So that makes you, what, the Balrog?”
Lanfen was surprised when, instead of taking umbrage, Tim laughed with delight. “Yeah, that’s me—the Balrog.” He shook his head and, in the blink of an eye, where he’d been standing was a ten-foot-tall, flaming demon with horns and glowing red eyes.
“Holy shit!” Dice yelped and leapt back several feet, nearly colliding with Lanfen, who steadied him, her eyes never leaving Tim.
The programmer dropped the illusion, doubled over with laughter. “You totally should have seen the look on your face, man. It was priceless.”
“Har, har,” Dice said wryly. “You ready to take some tests, bad boy?”
“Sure.” He made a flipping gesture with his hands and his two slobbering gargoyle bodyguards vanished.
Lanfen noticed with interest that their passage hadn’t even disturbed the pine needles that littered the clearing. Dice beckoned for Tim to follow him to the tent where they’d set up the Brewster-Brenton. Tim followed, still grinning, and Lanfen fell into step with him.
“Hey, Tim, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“If your gargoyles don’t have real drool, how did you do that amazing thing with the dragons when you guys fought off the Deeps? That was real ordnance they were firing.”
Tim seemed to grow in stature and the electricity they’d seen haloing him earlier reappeared. “Oh, you saw that, did you?”
“Of course. We were suitably impressed.”
“It was dead simple. The howitzers were wearing dragon suits. I had to split my attention, but the gun turrets were computerized, right? So I triggered, aimed, and fired those electronically, and then just applied my own special brand of, uh, costuming.”
“Pretty spectacular.”
“Hey, that was a while back, too. I’ve got quite a few more tricks up my sleeve, believe me.”
“I believe you.” Lanfen caught Dice’s eye as he turned to usher Tim into the lab tent. They were going to have to tread carefully if they didn’t want to find out the extent of Timmy’s new tricks the dangerous way.
“I can hardly wait to see what sort of measurements we get once we’ve got yo
u hooked up to the system,” Dice enthused. “This is going to be awesome.”
“Well, sure. ’Cause I’m awesome.”
Lanfen glanced at Brenda, who rolled her eyes but didn’t make any further acidic comments.
They gathered in the tent where the kinetic rig was set up. Having watched what Mike could do to metal walls and how easily a steel door could become warped and unusable, the Beta team had decided that a structure of thick fabric offered far fewer opportunities for serious mayhem. They’d minimized the potential for turning their lab equipment into deadly projectiles by removing the components—now far smaller than their parent devices anyway—from their metal racks and having them laid out on a table, which would theoretically keep them from being manipulated as a unit. Lanfen was still concerned about the wood in the tent’s frame. Her job was to keep a close eye—and her “spidey senses,” as Eugene called them—on Tim, and be prepared to go “full ninja” (also a Euge-ism) at the first sign of trouble.
She was hoping—they were all hoping—that it wouldn’t be necessary for her to go that far. She spared a thought for Joey Blossom, who was waiting for them in the isolation cabin, and ran through the drill again in her head: they’d take real measurements of Tim’s zeta capacity, and compare and contrast it with her own. What they’d really be doing, though, was keeping him occupied until Mini and Euge appeared, then administering a jolt of electricity and a tranq.
Then, into the tank.
Of course, there was always a chance Eugene and Mini wouldn’t show before Tim felt he’d overstayed his welcome . . . or they felt he had. In that case, they’d have to tranq him anyway and trust that Chuck had made it safely into the mountain.
It would work, she told herself, as Dice explained to Tim what sort of measures they were hoping to get and how they would quantify them. It had to work. She met Dice’s gaze as he placed the neural net on Tim’s head. He nodded and she had the eerie sense that he knew what she’d been feeling. More than that, she knew what he was feeling, as well. He was scared—something she prayed Tim wouldn’t pick up on.
“Hey,” Tim said, looking puzzled. He lifted the thin plait of wires that ran from the transceiver cap to the BPM. “Why are we hardwired? You going all Luddite on me? We scrapped hard connections ages ago.”
Dice shrugged. “No Wi-Fi here, Tim. We’re running the bare-bones minimum of tech. Had to set this up in kind of a hurry. So, if I want readings from your brainpan . . .”
“Yeah, I can see that would be a little restrictive. Gotta be hard for you and Euge, being offline like this.”
“You have no idea.” Dice put a second net on Lanfen’s head, then set the brain pattern monitor to read zeta waves. “Okay, ladies and gent, we are ready to begin. Lanfen, why don’t you start? Do something basic.”
“Mind if I get up and move around?” She pointed to the wide-open double-wide tent door and the grassy clearing beyond.
“Within reason,” Dice said. “You’ve got about twelve feet of cable. Use it wisely.”
She caught the grin in his words before she saw it on his face. They’d discussed at some length what sort of “tricks” she should perform. They wanted to impress, but without tipping their hand. Mostly, they wanted to play for time—give Chuck a good window of opportunity to get into the mountain and establish relations with Mike and Sara. It made Lanfen’s skin crawl, thinking of Chuck trapped in there with two potentially deadly people. Then she reminded herself that he wasn’t trapped. He had talents at his disposal that she wasn’t sure even he fully fathomed.
Still . . . she was going to worry a little.
She looked out at the shade-speckled glade and concentrated on the pine needles. She began to make a circling motion with one hand as if she were stirring something with the tips of her fingers. In the center of the glade, pine needles rippled and rose. In moments, she had a fifteen-foot-tall tornado of dried forest debris dancing in the sunlight, juggling pinecones and making a sound like white-water rapids. She let it perform for a minute or two, then bent the top down so it looked like a whirlwind Slinky.
She heard Tim’s laughter, and smiled before whipping what had been the bottom of the tornado over the top. She then repeated the flip-flop until the weird little cyclone had made a circuit of the entire glade, setting every tree branch and bough along the perimeter tossing wildly. She brought the thing to a stop right before the tent and, with her hair flying in its winds, made it bow before her. Then, she just let go of it.
The silence was sudden; the pinecones dropped to the ground, followed by the slowly wafting needles. In seconds, the glade was quiet and peaceful once more.
She turned to look at Dice. “Got what you need?”
“Yeah. That was great. Tim, if you would do basically the same thing Lanfen just did, it will give me a baseline for the amount of energy you’re generating and what effect it’s having on you.”
Tim made a face. “Really? You want me to just do a little parlor trick? I mean, I can do—you know—way more impressive things than that.”
“I’m sure you can,” said Dice. “And that time will come, believe me. You know how this works, Tim. I need a baseline—a benchmark.”
“Sure. Okay. I get it.” Tim moved to the door of the tent, then glanced over at Lanfen. “Notice that I don’t have to use those cute little hand gestures to get it going like you do. I mean, it’s very martial-artsy and all, Fen, but you look like you’re doing interpretive dance. Besides, I can tell what you’re going to do when you give it away like that. In a battle,” he added, darkness creeping into his eyes, “you don’t want to give anything away.”
He gave his attention back to the center of the clearing. After a moment, the little pile of needles Lanfen had left there stirred. They eddied, they started to rise . . . they subsided again. Tim’s brow knit and his mouth puckered in concentration. Clearly this was not something he was used to doing. It took him a moment, but at last he got the pine needles moving in a spiral and rising up from the grassy ground. The form of the tornado was noticeably less coherent and robust than Lanfen’s. It was still loose and unstable as it made its rounds; every Slinky move threatened to cause the whole thing to collapse.
Lanfen watched Tim’s face closely. He was twitchy and visibly annoyed that he was finding this “parlor trick” harder than he’d expected. As she watched, a sly smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. There was a flutter in the little cyclone, causing it to shed some of its needles, and it suddenly stabilized and appeared as solid and controlled as Lanfen’s—maybe even more so.
She turned to look at it, wondering what had caused the change. Had Tim just stepped through a learning threshold? The tornado was as coherent as hers, but it didn’t look like hers; it was smooth and shiny . . . like one of Tim’s constructs. And then she got it: Tim was cheating. He was using his ability to project a photonic construct. His pine needle tornado was a fake.
Lanfen glanced at Dice, who was watching from just behind her. He nodded, once. He knew.
The ersatz tornado flip-flopped, Slinky-style, around the camp, then came to a stop in front of the tent and bowed, just as Lanfen’s had. But Tim couldn’t resist putting a flourish on the gesture; a pair of red glowing eyes leered at them from within the vortex.
A bot Mike had named “Bradley” came for Chuck at the edge of the military camp. It was less a name than a description. The robot had a lot in common with a Bradley tank—treads, for one thing—and was outfitted with a seat that would accommodate a passenger or two.
Eugene was terrified of the damn thing until Mike’s voice issued from its speakers, which were mounted in the peculiar, turret-shaped head. It still weirded him out to watch Chuck climb into the passenger seat behind the squat, forward-leaning torso.
As if he sensed Eugene’s trepidation, Mike said, “Don’t worry, Euge. I’ll take care of Chuck. He’ll be okay. Promise.”
Then he turned the bot and sent it rolling back up the mountain at a clip that Eugene fou
nd nauseating to even watch. “Do you think he meant that?” he asked Mini, when she slipped up beside him and took his hand. “About taking care of Chuck, I mean?”
“I’m sure he did. They think Chuck is an ally. And, in a way, he is. We are. We need to remind ourselves of that. If we start thinking of them as enemies, it will change how we react to them. We’re doing this for them, too.”
Euge looked down at her and realized that as long as he was in her company, he’d believe anything. He tried to keep what she’d said in mind as they returned to the communications trailer and waited for Chuck’s go-ahead.
Bradley-Mike brought Chuck through the broad front entry of the mountain, which both surprised and unsettled him. The horrific evidence of the battle waged there was everywhere, and his passage through the scorched and devastated tunnel seemed glacial. At one point, they traversed a steel bridge over a dark well in which Chuck, looking down, could just make out what was left of a howitzer—or at least, that’s what he thought it was.
“This can’t be the only way into the Deep,” he said, his voice sounding tiny and pale in the cavernous passage.
“No, definitely not,” Mike replied. “We’ve got all sorts of ins and outs, but nothing we want to give away just now.” He lowered his voice and added, “Besides, Sara wants you to know what we’re capable of. She figures if you’re going to carry tales back to the POTUS and all, they ought to be really scary ones.”
“Is that what you want, too, Mike? For me to know what you’re capable of?” Chuck asked, cringing at the cold, oily, earthy touch of the cavern air on his skin.
There was a moment of silence, then Mike said quickly, “Yeah. But not the same way Sara does. I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Doc. Don’t be afraid of me.”
That sounded like a plea. “I don’t want to be afraid of you, either, Mike.”
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