He slid out of the cargo bay of the SUV to find half a dozen people looking at him. Dice, Brenda, and the two military men—Decker and Wood—stood in a semicircle several feet from the rear bumper, while Lanfen and Joey sat on the ground at their feet. Chuck dropped to his knees in front of Lanfen, taking her hands.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded. “Just mad. Frustrated. Furious. They got Mini.” This last came out in a low growl. “Lorstad and Alexis. I tried to mess with the engine—to bring them down softly—but one of them decked me.”
“Which one?”
“Alexis, I’m pretty sure. It didn’t feel like Lorstad.”
“What did she do to you?”
“I don’t know. I just lost my balance and folded up.”
“Wow—you never lose your balance.”
“I know. How’s Eugene?”
“He’ll be okay. How long was I working on him?”
“About fifteen minutes, Doctor,” said Decker, moving toward him a step or two. “I think we’d best be getting you all back to Spiderweb. Get the injured into the infirmary.”
Chuck looked at Joey. The Sho-Pai engineer seemed a little groggy. “Are you—”
Joey raised his hand in a vague gesture. “I’m good, really.”
“He has a concussion,” said Brenda. “He failed math. Or I’ve grown some extra fingers.”
Chuck reached reflexively for Joey’s head, laying his hand alongside the young man’s temple. Brenda was right; Joey did have a concussion, but Chuck was too depleted to do anything about it.
“Sir, I think we need to get everybody back to Spiderweb.”
Chuck looked up at Lieutenant Decker and nodded. “Yes. Yes, there’s nothing left to do here.” His gaze swept the ruined camp again, lingering for a moment on the two bodies lying broken and bloodied in the clearing. “Nothing left.”
He felt an overwhelming sense of failure. He had failed Sara and Tim. He had failed Mini. He could do nothing for the two dead Alphas; that failure was complete. But for Mini, he would move heaven and earth. He caught Lanfen’s eye and heard a single word in his head: We.
We will move heaven and earth.
Chuck had no doubt that they could.
Chapter 23
Moving Heaven
At Spiderweb, military doctors whisked Eugene and Joey off to their infirmary while Chuck and the others were escorted to a mobile unit roughly the size of their own habitat. Its spartan decor reminded Chuck of an anonymous waiting room—simple angular sofa, spare padded chairs in shades of gray and mauve, a low coffee table at one end, a tiny kitchenette, and a round table with a handful of straight-backed chairs at the other.
They found Mike there with Anton, the two guarded by a pair of uneasy MPs. Their unease was not obvious; Chuck felt it as a vague wriggling sensation at the nape of his neck. Anton, cuddled up tightly against his father’s side, was absorbed in a game he was playing on an iPad.
Mike . . . Mike looked haunted. His eyes when they met Chuck’s held a mix of wariness and despair. What had happened between now and the time they had parted company that had turned Mike into a cornered animal?
Lieutenant Decker saw to their creature comforts, showing them where there was bottled water, coffee, and food. Then he announced his intention to let the admiral know they had arrived safely.
“Where is she?” Chuck asked, mildly surprised that she wasn’t here to meet them.
“She’s over in the communications trailer, sir. Engaged in conversation with President Ellis.”
“Ah.” Chuck glanced at the men standing on either side of the door. “I wonder if we might have a moment alone with Mike and Anton.”
The lieutenant’s brow furrowed. “Sir?”
Chuck lowered his voice. “Mike doesn’t know . . . what happened to the others. I think I should be the one to tell him.”
“I’ll post the men just outside then, sir. If you should need them—”
Chuck smiled wanly. “Yes. Thank you, Lieutenant.”
He wondered what Decker imagined his two MPs could do against even one Zeta. He’d witnessed the destruction at the Beta base camp, after all. Chuck could only imagine that he was having trouble reconciling the new reality with the one he had lived with for his entire life. In Lieutenant Decker’s old reality, people simply did not wreak massive destruction with their brain waves.
When the door had closed behind the soldiers, Chuck moved to sit across from Mike in one of the waiting room chairs. Lanfen, Dice, and Brenda arranged themselves around the seating group as well, their expressions neutral.
“You okay, Mike?” Chuck asked.
Mike didn’t beat around the bush. “They want to get back inside the mountain, Doc. They want us to get them back inside the mountain—back inside the Deep.”
“You destroyed the Deep.”
“Yeah, I did. I blew the crap out of it. I buckled the floors and brought the mountain down on top of everything. I think there are still fires burning in there. But they think that if I brought it down, I can help them tunnel in.” Mike leaned forward, hands knotted into fists between his knees. “Doc, no one should get back into that mountain again. Ever. I brought out some of the bots so all your work wouldn’t be lost. I thought maybe they’d be interested in those. But they want me—us—to open the mountain up.”
Chuck was stunned. Why in the name of God . . .
He realized that everyone, even Anton, was looking at him.
“Who proposed that?” he asked. “Was it Admiral Hand?”
Mike shook his head. “The mission commander. Name’s Fredericks. He may have been speaking for Hand, but I’m not sure.”
“Then we ask. I’ve experienced Admiral Hand as being a reasonable woman. We’ll explain why it’s important no one get back into Olympus.”
Mike reddened. “Don’t call it that, Doc. It’s Deep Shield. It was always Deep Shield. Because when push came to shove, Sara wasn’t that much different than General Howard. They were both monsters. She’s just a more powerful monster.”
Chuck felt the tug of other minds and looked up to meet Lanfen’s gaze, then Dice’s.
Mike didn’t miss the brief interaction. “What is it? What happened with Sara and Tim? I figured since you’re here, you got them both on ice—no?”
Chuck met Mike’s eyes. “No, Mike. Things went from bad to worse.”
“We’d gotten Tim into an immersion tank,” said Lanfen, “but Sara killed our power and he escaped. They went after Eugene because he wasn’t like us.”
Mike’s eyes grew wide with fear. “They didn’t—”
“He’s in the infirmary here,” Lanfen reassured him. “He’ll be okay, thanks to Chuck. But after Euge was injured, they went after Mini and she . . . she took them on pretty much single-handedly. She’s a lot more powerful than any of us knew and they underestimated her. They were no match for her, in the end.” She took a deep breath. “Mike . . . Sara and Tim are dead.”
He sat very still for a moment, then looked down at Anton, who looked up from his game. Mike closed his eyes, pulled his son tightly to his side, and shook his head. “Sara stopped seeing reason a long time ago. And I don’t think Tim ever did see it. I don’t know how to feel about this, Doc,” he added. “Dead. I don’t know how to feel.”
“None of us does, Mike,” said Dice. “This is terra incognita for all of us.”
“And for our hosts,” said Lanfen. “I want to trust the president and her chief of staff. I want to trust Admiral Hand. But they’re not the final authority when it comes to what happens to us. There’s Congress to deal with—maybe more men like Bluth who just haven’t exposed themselves yet. There are factions that will fight over us. People who will want something from us, even if it’s an assurance that we’re not like Sara and Tim.”
“And me?” Mike asked, his expression guarded.
“Stop beating yourself up, Mike,” said Dice. “No one should be put in the position you were in. Sara and
Tim were actively trying to run the world. You weren’t. You got caught with them when Deep Shield decided to go underground.”
“They really thought they were doing the right thing, though,” Mike said. “At least Sara did. Tim didn’t give a rat’s ass about doing the right thing. In his head, he was still playing a video game. I guarantee you that some people are gonna think we’re all like that. And whether we are or not, some people are always going to think of us as inhuman monsters.” Mike shook his head and forcefully exhaled. “And maybe we are. I drank the Kool-Aid, too, Doc. It wasn’t poured down my throat. I took my seat on . . . the mountain. Can’t just brush that aside, isn’t right. The rightful pain I feel about this, all of this, is just about the only thing I can make sense of right now.”
The sound of footsteps ascending the steps outside the cabin were the only warning they got before the door opened to admit Admiral Hand and the mission commander, Colonel Fredericks. Hand had a laptop tucked under one arm, which she set on a side table and flipped open.
“The president will be joining us online momentarily. Obviously, we have questions for you. In the meantime, I’d like to answer any questions you have for me.”
Chuck realized that, once again, all eyes were on him. He took a deep breath. “I think the most pressing question is what happens to us now? Especially Mike.” He didn’t miss the look that Anton gave his dad.
Joan Hand seated herself next to the side table and gave Chuck her entire attention. “I can’t tell you that, Doctor. That will come out of our conversation with the president. What would you like to happen?”
“I think I can speak for all of us when I say that our first order of business is to get Mini back from the Benefactors. She did not go willingly. They took her—for purposes that I’m not sure I understand.”
“Do you even know where these people are?”
“Yes,” said Dice. “We do. And as powerful as they are as an organization, there’s no way they can close down or move that facility quickly. They might abandon it if they suspected we knew where it was. But they were trying to hide that from us till the last. While we were there, we were never allowed to see anything more than just the immediate area. Lorstad brought us here one at a time using his ability to teleport. Even the outsiders who work at the Center are brought in blindfolded to live on-site. Joey didn’t even know where it was until I hacked their system and mapped it.”
Hand nodded. “How dangerous do you think these so-called Benefactors are? What’s their agenda?”
“Frankly,” said Dice, “they seem to have a massive superiority complex. They view themselves as the next step in human evolution—or did until they got wind of what we were doing. Then they realized their own system of obtaining extraordinary talents had limitations.”
“You mentioned that they have to undergo some sort of ‘recharging’ period.”
“Yeah. And even for adepts as experienced as Lorstad—the man who took Mini—that can mean hours in an isolation unit. Their abilities are artificially maintained.”
“I see,” said Hand. “So if they’re cut off from their technology—”
“They weaken,” Chuck said. “They lose their abilities to some extent. I don’t know to what extent because we’ve never seen them get that low. And it seems like they are able to do some fairly amazing things before they get to that point.”
The laptop pinged just then, and the admiral answered the summons. In a moment, Margaret Ellis appeared on the screen. Chuck saw that she was not alone—there were a number of other people in the Situation Room with her. He recognized her chief of staff, Curtis Chamberlin, and two of the other men. They were Phalen Whitecross and Joseph Firestone, a pair of high-profile senators from opposing parties—both of whom had already made noises about running for president. That realization raised the hackles on Chuck’s metaphorical spine. He hated to think their fate lay in the hands of anyone vying for public office or hoping to score points with a constituency.
There were introductions all around and Chuck tried to read the faces of the men seated around the table with the president. He saw unease, curiosity, suspicion.
It became apparent that the big-ticket item for the legislators was whether or not to come clean to the American people about what had really gone down in Michaux State Preserve. Were Sara and Tim homegrown terrorists who had been taken out by an elite paramilitary squad (Zeta Squad, appropriately), or was the whole story to be made public, now that the danger had passed? “Wait,” said Chuck, interrupting Senator Whitecross. “I’m sorry, but we don’t know the danger has passed. These people calling themselves the Benefactors—or the Learned—have taken a member of my team. A young woman who they obviously feel will be useful to them in some way. I have no idea what they intend to do with her or to her, but I can tell you that these people have a worldwide network and have very little regard for those they feel are—are . . .”
“Inferior,” finished Lanfen.
“They’re not as powerful as the individuals you took out, are they?” asked Colonel Fredericks. “You said they were tied to their tech.”
“Mini ‘took them out,’” said Lanfen, “and they’ve got her. They’ve also got several very talented novice Zetas that we were working with before we came here.”
“And,” said Dice, “they’ve got our equipment. They have two complete kinetic conversion rigs, which means that they could potentially manufacture more machines and raise up more Zetas.”
“And do what with them?” asked Senator Firestone.
“I don’t know,” said Chuck, “but one thing is that the Learned are not all on the same page when it comes to their future interactions with—”
“Profanes,” finished Dice. “That’s what some of them call people they don’t consider Learned.”
“The two Benefactors that we interacted with the most,” said Chuck, “were exemplary of that seeming divide within the group. Our initial contact, Kristian Lorstad, and his associate, Alexis Bruinsma, were at odds over how to regard our technology and what it portended for human evolution. I gathered that both of them are answerable to—and maybe even members of—some sort of guiding council. We never learned much about them. Lorstad seemed reluctant to discuss it—sidestepping our questions or giving minimalist answers.”
“So what you’re saying is,” said President Ellis, “we have a virtually unknown organization with powers similar to your own whose agenda is also unknown.”
“Not quite unknown,” said Chuck. “They want to create a more robust society that will weather whatever happens to the rest of the world.”
“Do you think they intend to recruit people?” asked Firestone. “Like a terrorist organization?”
“No. They most definitely do not want to recruit people. From what I gather, the organization started with a group of European families and has been restricted to members of those families for several generations, at least. Their numbers are relatively small—or at least that’s what we were told—because not every member of every family responds to their technology.” He shook his head—this had been going on long enough. Now it was time for some answers. “President Ellis, the admiral asked us if we had any questions. We do. Chiefly, what do you intend to do with us?”
There was, as Chuck suspected, no cut-and-dried answer to that question, so it was something they discussed at length—discussed, in fact, until the sun had begun to set. Sara’s and Tim’s bodies had a more certain destiny than the living did. They had already been transported to a military medical facility where they would be autopsied and studied. The thought of it made Chuck queasy, but he had to admit that it was the most practical thing to do under the circumstances. He shared his team’s desire to take up their research again—to find a way to make zeta capabilities a boon to mankind.
“Zeta talent,” said Chuck, “needs to be further studied. The potential is astounding. And we need to learn how to cultivate it for the benefit of humanity. By that, I mean the simple, pr
actical things zeta waves can be employed to do that will enrich people’s lives: allow a paraplegic to remain gainfully employed; allow surgeons to heal without cutting through tissue to get to an injury or disease-ridden organ or tumor; allow people engaged in dangerous work to do it in less dangerous ways. We’d like to go back to the beginning, before Deep Shield came into the picture. Before Olympus. I don’t know if that’s possible, but it’s what we’d like. And we’d prefer to do it out in the open. In fact, I think honesty about what’s happened would be the best policy for you to take.”
“I tend to agree with that,” Margaret Ellis said, “but you have to realize that I can’t make the decision in a vacuum. Be patient with us, Dr. Brenton. We will try to move as swiftly as possible and keep you in the loop as much as we can. In the meantime, I think we need to move you to a more secure facility.”
Chuck felt the sharp tang of concern from his entire team. “With all due respect, President Ellis, we’ve had our fill of secure facilities. Between Deep Shield and the Benefactors, we’ve been held against our will for far too long.”
The president smiled wanly. “I promise we’ll try to make it as painless as possible.”
“And brief. We will submit for the short term in good faith, but, Madam President, our days of being locked away for our own safety are over.” The severe tone of voice was foreign to Chuck but punctuated his declaration perfectly.
The president took in a breath and decided it was not in her best interest to turn Dr. Brenton into an enemy. “For now then?”
“As I said, a very brief now.”
“What about the mountain?” asked Mike sharply. “There’s been talk of making me open it up again. It should never be opened up, ma’am. Not ever. What’s down there should just stay down there. That’s why I blew the crap out of the place.”
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