The bot came to the end of its trek and rolled through a set of thick steel doors and down a concrete ramp lit by strip LEDs. The bot had gone perhaps ten feet into the corridor when the doors ground shut behind it. Chuck tried to ignore the frisson of dread that ran up the back of his neck and focused his senses ahead.
In a minute or so, they came to another set of steel doors and Bradley-Mike said wryly, “You have arrived at your destination.”
The doors slid back. Mike was framed in the aperture. For a relieved moment, Chuck thought he might have an opportunity to speak to Mike alone. A second later, though, Sara appeared from around a corner in the corridor behind Mike and strode forward to meet him.
“Welcome to Olympus, Chuck,” she said. “You’ll have to leave your chariot without. The treads sort of tear up the floors.”
“Ah. Of course.”
Chuck climbed out of Bradley’s passenger seat and entered the Deep once more. He felt the weight of the mountain pressing down on him. He was surprised out of the depressing funk when Sara threw her arms around him in a bear hug.
“It’s good to see you face-to-face, Doc. Really good.”
She stepped back so he could shake hands with Mike. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed. She looked healthy—radiant even—and she generated a field of what seemed like electrostatic energy that Chuck felt as tiny prickles on his skin. Mike . . . Mike was a different story altogether. He’d lost weight and while he’d clearly been working out, he didn’t seem to be in good health. His color wasn’t encouraging and the exhaustion Chuck saw in his eyes was underscored with dark circles. His mouth was stretched at the corners, his smile strained.
“Ready for the grand tour?” Sara asked.
“As soon as I let the admiral know I’m safely inside,” Chuck said. “She doesn’t seem to trust your robots to get me from point A to point B without incident.”
“As you wish,” Sara said, smiling, and turned to lead the way farther into her domain.
Chuck fell into step between the two Alphas. He heard the doors swish shut behind them and pretended he had not.
“What am I looking at?” Tim asked, peering at the side-by-side display of brain wave patterns. “I mean, I know those are my readings and these are Lanfen’s, but what do they tell you about me?”
“That you’ve been growing, young man,” Dice said. “And that you’re outputting a lot of kinetic energy.” He swept a finger along the jagged peaks that represented Tim’s attempts to herd pine needles.
“What does it mean that it smooths out like that?” Tim pointed to a decidedly lower-output segment of his pattern.
“It means that you mastered the task,” Dice lied. What it actually meant was that he’d switched to a modality that he was familiar with—that is, he’d cheated, and swapped learning to manhandle real objects for tailoring one of his projections to the task at hand. He had managed to keep some of the needles airborne, but sloppily.
“So, Lanfen didn’t do as well on the test, did she?” Tim concluded, glancing at the martial arts master’s clean, smooth, regular pattern. “I put out more raw energy, didn’t I?”
“You did,” admitted Dice, but did not say that all his raw power had failed to accomplish what Lanfen’s controlled expenditure of zeta energy had. His exaggerated, vivid mountain range of output had been like a weight lifter straining to raise a barbell that was simply too heavy. That was the good news. The bad news was that his demonstration of raw power showed that Tim Desmond had huge untapped reserves. If he had been able to channel them properly toward manipulating solid objects, he’d be a formidable adversary.
“So, since that was clearly a piece of cake,” Dice said, “are you game to try something more challenging?”
“You have to ask?” Tim’s enjoyment was obvious.
“Okay,” said Lanfen. “You choose something. Something spectacular. I’ll try to emulate it.”
Tim grinned from ear to ear and rubbed his hands together. His spiky aura of blue-white static brightened perceptibly. “All righty, then. What shall I do?” He looked around, then peered through the door of the tent. “Oh, I know. Hey, Lanfen, can you do this?”
His gaze fixed on something across the glade and a second later, the engine of one of the SUVs roared to life. The vehicle backed out from under its sheltering tree and into the center of the clearing.
Dice laughed nervously. “Dude, don’t go wrecking our cars, okay?”
“Wouldn’t think of it, Dice. Watch this.” Tim spun the SUV around in reverse, spewing fallen leaves and pine needles everywhere.
Dice glanced at the brain pattern monitor; the waves were smooth, but elevated. Tim was in his wheelhouse—manipulating the car’s computer systems. A moment later, he was spiking way up into the 9 mHz range and the front end of the SUV tilted toward the sky as it danced and pivoted on its rear wheels. Dice looked at Tim. The veil of blue-white iridescence around him had intensified with his effort to physically manipulate the vehicle.
“This is child’s play, you know,” Tim said, watching the results of his work.
Dice’s eyes were drawn past the capering car to the verge of the wood. Eugene and Mini had appeared there, hand in hand, their eyes on the SUV’s performance. Dice gave Bren a glance; she showed him the infuser she’d palmed. He caught Lanfen’s eye and knew she’d seen the couple, too.
Lanfen pointed. “Hey, look who’s here.”
Bren crossed the tent to stand on Tim’s opposite side. “Hey, it’s Mini and Euge!” She waved.
Tim, distracted, let the SUV drop back to four wheels, though it still cut a tight circle in the clearing. Dice hit a switch on the Brewster-Brenton and flooded the neural net on the programmer’s head with an electrical charge. Tim’s body jerked, his aura faltered, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Bren chose that moment to jab his neck with the infuser.
Tim’s halo of energy proved to be more than just a keen special effect. A second after dimming, it was back full force. Brenda cried out and wrenched her hand back. Tim sent a wild charge of energy back down the line to the brain pattern monitor. The machine overloaded, sending sparks everywhere. Dice leapt out of their way, watching Tim writhe and try to pull the neural net from his head. He succeeded only in getting his fingers tangled in it. As he staggered, on the verge of falling, Lanfen stepped in and administered a karate chop to Tim’s neck.
The nimbus of static energy went white, Tim lurched forward, and Lanfen went flying. She tumbled through the door of the tent and out into the clearing, where she hit the ground and rolled—directly into the path of the spinning SUV.
For a frozen moment, Dice was certain she’d be crushed. The upward cut she made with one hand could not be quick enough . . .
But it was.
The vehicle flipped over, landing on one side, its wheels spinning futilely. They stopped when the engine went silent. Lanfen leapt to her feet and gave a quick glance over her shoulder at Mini and Eugene before racing back to the tent.
Dice moved at the same time to where Tim now lay—half-in and half-out of the tent. He was clearly unconscious, but the veil of energy sizzled fitfully around him. Dice reached down and tried to touch him, only to receive an unpleasant jolt when his hand was more than three inches away.
“Wow,” said Euge, peering around Lanfen. “That’s quite a security system he’s got there.”
“Yeah. How are we supposed to get him into a tank?” Bren asked, still massaging her wounded hand.
Lanfen and Mini exchanged glances. “I think Mini and I can work that out,” Lanfen said. “And thanks, Min. I appreciated the help out there. I’m pretty sure I didn’t flip that car on my own.”
The other woman tilted her head and smiled. “What are friends for?”
“Right now,” said Dice, “they’re for getting this guy on ice. Ladies, you said you have a plan?”
They did. Without using their hands, they lifted the programmer’s body and floated it toward the immersion cabin
. Dice hurried ahead of them and opened the door. Joey popped the closest tank open the moment he saw Dice and, together, the two women hoisted Tim into the unit and lowered him until his head and shoulders were just above the gelatinous contents of the tank.
“Why’s he all lit up like that?” Joey asked in hushed tones.
“He’s projecting some sort of energy field,” Dice explained. “A very potent one, at the moment. Which raises the question of how we’re going to get the entraining helm on his head.”
“No worries,” said Lanfen. “Mini, can you just hold him there?”
“You got it.”
The artist’s face took on an expression of intense concentration as she stepped up onto the isolation unit’s surrounding platform and peered down into the tank. Dice, watching through one of the unit’s ports, thought he saw the barest suggestion of a translucent figure standing in the tank holding Tim’s head and upper torso out of the gel. Standing beside Mini on the platform, Lanfen set her gaze firmly on the unit’s half helm. She moved it deftly into position on Tim’s head with the concentration of a major-league pitcher threading a slider through a narrow strike zone.
“Can you teach me to do that?” Joey asked as he took a seat at the control console. “That is a very cool talent.” His hands moved on the control keyboard and the lid of the SDU glided shut, sealing Tim Desmond within.
“Maybe some other time,” Lanfen said through gritted teeth.
“Oh . . . right.”
A moment later, a light on the half helm began to pulse as the system fed binaural beats into Tim’s unconscious brain. The static halo began to fade. In moments, it was gone.
“Okay, Eugene,” she said, “time for you to go ping Chuck. Let him know the trap’s been sprung.”
“Yeah,” Eugene murmured. “I’ll just do that.” He turned in the doorway, and left the cabin at a run.
Dice raised his eyes to the isolation unit’s interior monitor and wondered again what was possible to a zeta adept. He laid a hand on Joey’s shoulder. “Whatever you do, don’t let him dream.”
Chapter 20
Adepts
Sara and Mike gave Chuck a tour of their mountain. They had made the portions they used more than livable. Mike’s talent for construction, coupled with Sara’s sense of design, had resulted in an environment that was both beautiful and functional. The living quarters were comfortable without being opulent; the kitchen/dining room was a study in convenience and functionality; the ops center looked like something out of Star Trek. But the robotics bays were a revelation. Chuck had seen them through Thorin’s optics when Lanfen had gone on her espionage mission within Deep Shield. Then they had been a series of long, narrow rooms arranged around a hub. Now the dividing walls were gone (he guessed Mike had done that) and long lines of robots seemed to march off into infinity on both sides of the labs.
The lab tables and equipment that had once stood in the center of the rooms were also gone, which gave the place the atmosphere of a futuristic warehouse full of larger-than-life toys. The knowledge that they weren’t toys made Chuck shiver.
“Impressive,” he said, forcing his voice to sound enthusiastic instead of terrified. “You’ve done an amazing job of making this place less . . . spartan and military. If we could train a generation of architects and construction engineers in zeta tech, it would revolutionize the construction industry and allow people with disabilities to stay productive.”
Sara laughed. “Doc, that is so you. That sort of thinking is why we need you here in Olympus. Here you could be the architect of a new world. With the whole team here, there’s nothing we couldn’t accomplish.”
“I was hoping to take you out into the real world, Sara. To get all of us out of the shadows—out from underground.”
She looked away from him down the length of the robot bays. “Yeah, I was hoping that, too, but there’s hope and then there’s reality. Reality, Doc, is what you saw on the way in. We did that. I don’t know how many soldiers died when we repelled that invasion, but I do know that the fact of their death makes us coming out into polite company . . . well, a bit problematic.”
“They were black ops, Sara,” Chuck said. “No—more than that. They were enemies of the United States and every citizen in it. Enemies of its government. You blew their cover sky-high. More than that, you uncovered the men behind them. I know the president is grateful for that.”
Sara gave him a look that was almost pitying. “Watch this, Doc,” she said, then launched herself into the air.
It was not like one of Lanfen’s gymnastic vaults; it was a slow-motion lift, like a heron taking flight or a circus acrobat riding her tether into the big top. She flew down the length of the robot bays, her back arched, then turned a series of lazy loops in the air.
Chuck glanced at Mike. He was watching Sara, too, his expression unreadable. “How long has she been able to do that?” Chuck asked.
Mike shrugged. “Not that long. I first saw her do something like this about a week ago, I guess. She and Tim both mostly work with electronics. Me, I’m more of a Luddite.”
“Nonsense,” Sara said, touching down between the two men. “You’re amazing, Mike. Show Chuck what you can do with the robots.”
Mike acquiesced in a way that sent chills through the very marrow of Chuck’s bones. Could he really wrest Mike from Sara’s grasp? Mike merely turned to look down the long gallery and every single unit visible from Chuck’s vantage point came to life and stepped down from its charging station in unison so perfect, he couldn’t make out the sounds of individual footfalls, but only heard one single, titanic step.
“Are they . . . that is, do they have to move in lockstep? Or can you—”
With a glance at Sara, Mike had the first ten bots face left and march in place while the ten beyond them took two perfectly timed steps out, turned, and marched up beside them. A third decade marched up beside those. Chuck had expected the sound to be deafening, but the soft soles of the robots’ feet made them sound more like a squadron of sneakered cheerleaders than a pack of metal men.
All thirty bots continued to march until Mike interrupted them with a drill sergeant’s shout, “Halt!” The robots went completely still.
Chuck was about to ask another question when Mike put his metal minions through a series of exercises that reminded him alternately of the Rockettes, a martial arts class, and a bunch of kids doing the hokey-pokey. The effect was so absurd, he wanted to laugh, but found he couldn’t.
“That’s truly impressive,” he said—and meant it. “Both of you. Sara, I’m curious—how high an elevation can you manage with your levitation?”
“I’ve touched the ceiling in ops,” she told him with obvious pride. “That’s a good twenty or thirty feet. Didn’t feel like too much of a strain. It’s just a matter of packing sufficient molecules together.”
He nodded. Just. “Mike, I get the feeling that you’re pretty agnostic about what kind of machinery you operate. I mean, it doesn’t matter to you what sort of machinery it is, right?”
Mike’s smile seemed grim. “If it’s got moving parts, I can make them move. If it doesn’t . . .” He shrugged eloquently. “I can make it have moving parts.”
Chuck wondered if Mike had tumbled to the idea that human beings were just different kinds of machines . . . at least on the outside. He hoped not, or that if he had, the thought terrified him as much as it did Chuck.
Chuck shook off the cold, dark niggle of fear that jittered down his spine and went to another of his time-wasting tactics. “You know, I’d love to get some baseline measurements on amplitude from both of you while I’m here. Do you have an EEG machine?”
“Yeah, we do,” Mike said. “In the infirmary. Do you wanna—”
Sara cut him off. “That can wait. Besides, I figured you’d want us to come down the mountain so you could use your state-of-the-art tools to take measurements.”
“True enough. I’m just intensely curious about what levels of am
plitude you’re pushing. I mean, being able to affect enough molecular material to levitate or blow down a wall must take significant output.”
Sara grinned. “Same old Chuck. Okay, Dad, we’ll let you measure our growth before we talk about strategy. But first, I want to show you something.” She started for the laboratory doors.
Chuck had no recourse but to fall into step. “Oh? What’s that?”
She glanced back over her shoulder at him. “A God’s-eye view of Pine Flat.”
Chuck swore that, for a split second, he forgot how to walk. The last thing he needed was for Sara and Mike to get a God’s-eye view of the area below their mountain—specifically of the Betas’ base camp. He could only pray that Tim had already been incapacitated and hustled into an isolation tank. He stopped walking, causing Sara and Mike to stop, too.
“How, uh, how high up is that, exactly?”
Mike shot him a glance. “You afraid of heights, Doc?”
“Oh, well, uh, afraid is maybe not quite the right word. Let’s just say my visits to New York have never included the Empire State Building tour.” Feigning a fear of heights was the only gambit Chuck’s panicked mind could conjure.
“It’s perfectly safe,” said Sara. “After all, there’s an entire mountain holding you up. And the deck is solid as the rock it’s sitting on. Mike built it. Come on, Chuck, live a little. You can’t be afraid to be in a mountain and afraid to be on one, too.”
I sure as hell can, he thought. But Chuck looked at the construction engineer and smiled, hoping he looked as if he were attempting to hide panic. “Well, that’s a ringing endorsement. I guess I can close my eyes. How do you get up there?”
“I built an elevator,” Mike told him. “You’re not afraid of elevators, are you?”
“Only mildly concerned. How many stories do you think it is?”
“Don’t worry about it, Doc,” Mike said, patting his shoulder. “I promise, you’ll be okay.”
Chuck nodded and they began to move again, down the long axis of the installation, to the operations center. Mike’s elevator had been installed in a large empty room some yards to the northeast of ops.
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