by Eric Flint
"I have nothing to do with that," Lann said. "It's the next step in evolution. Why fight it? Embrace it, for the betterment of the human race."
"There's nothing natural about it. Everyone knows of your machine for transforming babies into telepathic monsters. You use your rays on pregnant mothers and newborn infants, causing them to develop tendrils."
"That is absurd propaganda. Everyone 'knows' about it only because of the lies you and your organization have spread." Another slap across his face. Dr. Lann didn't even seem rattled.
"We know your son and daughters have barricaded themselves inside your fortress lab. One can only guess what they're doing in there. Is it true both daughters are pregnant? Who is the father?"
"None of your business. We have done nothing wrong."
"Then why won't they let us come in and inspect?"
Lann sneered at the interrogators. "Because you've already proved yourselves to be prejudiced oafs. You wouldn't understand what you find. You could easily plant evidence."
"If you cooperate, Dr. Lann, perhaps we'll be merciful."
"I think this interview is over." Lann struggled to stand up, but the gloved hands shoved him back down into the chair.
"It's over when we finish asking you questions."
But Lann clenched his jaws, crossed his arms over his chest, and refused to say another word. The tape ran for several long minutes. The interrogator prodded and provoked him, but he would not answer. Finally the recording ended.
Anthea could only stare. This information had been kept from the public! How could the government have sealed away such details from everyone? It was as if someone—someone in control—wanted the slans to remain hated.
CHAPTER 21
While the chicken was roasting in the oven, sending savory smells throughout the house, Granny showed the fugitives their separate rooms and allowed them to clean up and rest. But she had other business with Jommy.
As he followed the old woman, he suspected that she had a scheme up her sleeve. Even though he had worked to adjust her corrupt attitudes over the years, she could easily have reverted to her villainous old self. At the moment, however, he had few other choices.
Spry with eagerness, Granny walked around to the back of the house, where she pulled up the wooden door to the root cellar. Instead of the traditional smells of dirt, cobwebs, and old vegetables, Jommy saw bright lights, tiled walls, and metal stairs leading to one of his underground chambers. "I thought you might like to see this—I salvaged a few scraps. Important scraps." Her eyes glittered. "I'm sure it's worth something to you."
Jommy looked around in amazement and confusion. "But I triggered the self-destruct myself, just before I led the tendrilless away from here on a wild-goose chase! I gave you a hypnotic instruction."
"Yes, you did, but Granny's mind found a way around it." She propped her hands on her bony hips. "And I had a devil of a time saving some of your papers and blueprints and designs. I had burns and blisters on my face and hands for weeks!"
"But why would you do that? It was dangerous, and foolish." He stepped ahead, amazed to see so many intact boxes and shelves. He had expected it all to be destroyed, and he couldn't keep the appreciation and admiration out of his voice. "You saved so much of my work."
She snorted. "It could have been valuable. I always intended to sell it, but I wasn't sure how much it was worth. I didn't want to be cheated. Everybody wants to cheat Granny." She narrowed her eyes. "And what's it worth to you now, Jommy? Take a look around."
She led him into a chamber where she had stacked a pile of singed lab notebooks along with some of his personal inventions, instruments he used for testing circuits and improvising power sources. With a flourish, she opened a metal cabinet full of small components, valuable micro-generators, and a host of other devices the world had never seen before.
Jommy was grinning. "It's a starting point for me to rebuild everything, Granny. But it's still missing a great many of my records and notes. Most of those were burned, I'm sure."
"Oh, they burned all right. But Granny has more. Not everything was lost." Her expression was very devious. "During our four peaceful years here, when everybody liked each other in the whole valley, I used to sneak into your laboratories at night. I copied many of your notebooks—and you didn't suspect a thing!" She cackled. "It was just a precaution. Common sense, actually. You would have done it yourself. Maybe old Granny's figured out how to block your slan mind probing, eh?"
"Very risky, Granny. If the tendrilless got their hands on this information--"
She pointed a scolding finger at him. "Don't you get all high and mighty, Jommy Cross. It was a bit of insurance, and if you were to leave me—which you did—then I had something I could sell. I was sure there'd be many buyers for these notes and blueprints."
"So why didn't you sell them?"
Now the old woman looked away. "I was afraid to. What would I say? 'A slan criminal left me these designs because I sheltered him for so long?' I would have been arrested by people like that John Petty you brought into this house."
Jommy knew the old woman was right.
"So now you owe it to Granny. I'm an old woman with modest needs. I don't have to be filthy rich, but I wouldn't mind a little wealth here and there."
He knew Granny would never be satisfied. Only her constant, greedy dreams of having more kept her going.
She took him through several of his old laboratory rooms, which were cluttered and dark. The walls bore serious burn and smoke marks, and half of the lights didn't work. She'd used his precision testing room to store canned vegetables and sacks of sugar, flour, and beans. It would take him quite a while to clean and set up his lab again, but it was quite a head start.
Granny led him with her stiff-legged gait down the tunnel that went under the ranch house to one of the outbuildings. "This way. One last thing. Extremely impressive. And valuable—very valuable." Her chuckle turned into a dry cough.
They climbed a set of metal stairs. Granny flicked a switch to activate the lights, then raised a hatch to the small hangar shed Jommy had built. He climbed out onto the sealed concrete floor and just stared. "It's still intact!" His fast rocket-plane, which he had built for his special explorations.
"Not just intact, young man—it's fully fueled and ready to launch, just the way you left it."
He startled the old woman by throwing his arms around her in a hug. She felt like a sack of sharp elbows and ribs and shoulder blades. "Granny, you may well have helped save the world. That must be worth a very large reward. I am very impressed."
* * *
The next day, with Kathleen sitting beside him in the well-lit laboratory chamber, Jommy carefully cracked open the first of his father's notebooks in the stack on the table. He didn't want Petty close to him while he looked at the papers, and President Gray had left the two of them alone, preoccupied with possible plans to draw up a defense of what remained of civilization on Earth.
Jommy had slept for only a few hours the night before, too excited to lie around in bed. Kathleen also got up at dawn, looking refreshed and beautiful. Granny brought them a pot of strong coffee, and the bitter roasted scent drifted into the air. She had also cooked a big breakfast of fried eggs and potatoes, which Gray and Petty gladly devoured, but Jommy was too anxious to get to work in the laboratories.
"This is very interesting stuff," Kathleen said, scanning the records as she sat beside him. Granny had copied many of the documents onto fresh paper, but they devoted their initial efforts to the original records. "Your father's conclusions are . . . remarkable."
"He was killed when I was only six, but he placed these volumes in storage for me, to help me reach my potential. But they weren't just gifts—they were clues, his way of showing me what I could become. I wish I'd known him better." He heaved a sigh.
Kathleen picked up the bottom journal on the stack, the one most severely singed around the edges. Granny must have pulled it directly from the flames. S
he turned the brittle, brown pages, looking at Peter Cross's tight, neat handwriting. As she flipped from one page to the other, she frowned, then held one page up to the light. "Jommy, look! There's something more here. I thought it was just a stain, but . . ."
Leaning close, he saw faint lines and scrawls, diagrams and symbols that might have been shadows of letters etched into the paper. "Thermal-response ink. The heat from the fire must have activated it."
"It's all just gibberish. Can you decipher it?"
"If my father created the code, then I can translate it. It just might take a little while."
"And help," Kathleen added, "which I'm glad to provide."
Jommy picked up the other notebooks, carefully warmed some of the pages over a small flame, and saw that many of the pages did bear secondary messages. Messages for him. Peter Cross's notebooks were already so full of unexpected details and incredible revelations that he would never have thought to look for additional information.
But the information he found between the lines were even more amazing.
Jommy and Kathleen worked intensely for hours, transcribing the symbols onto clean sheets of paper. Jommy set up graphs to decode the messages, while Kathleen scrutinized them, remembering all the intensive schooling Kier Gray had given her at the grand palace. Back then, many detractors had complained about the waste of time and energy in educating a slan girl who was due to be executed on her eleventh birthday. But the President had insisted. She knew a great deal about encryption and secret messages, more than the palace workers ever suspected.
Jommy finally discovered a connection, figuring out that one of the symbols indicated a letter in his mother's name and another in Jommy's own name. From that point, they possessed a key to part of the alphabet, and by translating bit by bit, unfolding incomplete words and filling in blanks, they picked up speed. Jommy and Kathleen vigorously cracked the code, both of them grinning, their slan tendrils waving as they shared telepathic excitement. They laid out the real message Peter Cross had hidden in his journals.
Jommy read the lines of text, barely daring to breathe. "It's directions to my father's main laboratory. A major slan base containing technology far beyond anything I've ever invented. It was there that he did his greatest work."
"The diagrams are a map, and these numbers are geographical coordinates." Kathleen eagerly leaned over his shoulder, reading. Jommy felt her nearness, smelled the faint perfume of soap on her skin, and a great warmth filled him. She picked up on his thoughts and let her fingers trail down his shoulder as she kept reading. "It sounds like the greatest repository of slan knowledge in the world. Look here." She pointed. "He says it includes machinery and stored energy sources dating all the way back to the time of Samuel Lann himself."
"Maybe that's where the other slans are hiding. We could sure use their help. That place could be the key!" He looked up at her, suddenly frowning. "But now I've lost my father's disintegrator weapon, thanks to Petty. My father left it for me. He considered it his greatest, most dangerous weapon. With the tendrilless taking over the Earth, we have a huge fight ahead of us. We'll need every advantage we can get."
"Can you build another one? I'll help—"
"The technology is beyond even me, and my father didn't leave the designs. He considered the weapon to be too deadly for anyone but his own son. It could have been our greatest advantage." He squeezed her hand.
"No, Jommy. We ourselves are the greatest advantage. The disintegrator was destroyed along with the palace. You'll have to learn to do without it."
He caught his breath as an idea occurred to him. "Not necessarily. I placed a locator tag on the weapon." He gestured to the metal cabinet against the wall. "I can modify some of this equipment to pick up the signal. I could easily trace it, even if it's buried in the rubble of the palace. If I find the disintegrator, then we can hold our own—and take back the world."
She looked at him puzzled, not sure what he meant. Her tendrils waved in the air.
"I'm going back to the city. I intend to retrieve it, no matter what it takes."
CHAPTER 22
The last of the Samuel Lann records were a hodge-podge of media reports and news items. Wanting to know more, to know everything, Anthea viewed them all, drinking in the horrifying details.
One clip blared that the dangerous Dr. Lann had escaped from custody and interrogation. A squat, angry-looking man spoke to the reporter, "Our security is tight, but his mutants possess abilities against which we have no defenses. It's clear to me that Dr. Lann's own corrupted children were involved in the breakout. They twisted our minds, hypnotized us so they could free their father." He sounded quite indignant.
"This proves two things. First, this implies that Dr. Lann is indeed guilty of everything we suspect him of doing. If he had nothing to hide, as he insists, why would he escape? Second," the man pointed now at the camera, "it proves that these slans are a genuine threat. Look what happened here! With such mind powers, they could walk into any home, rob our families, assault our wives, kidnap—or even mutate—our children! Be afraid of them. We should all be very afraid."
The next clip showed a large building completely engulfed in flames. Fire vehicles and army troops had surrounded the structure, but did nothing to quench the blaze. The emergency personnel stood back and watched, waited, like predators. They didn't seem to be there to help.
Finally, a lone man broke out of the doors and ran away from the blazing laboratory. His clothes were on fire. He waved his hands, screaming. Anthea recognized Dr. Lann himself. Instead of helping him, though, the soldiers raised their rifles and shot him in full view of everyone. Lann's body jittered as a dozen bullets struck him full in the chest. Then he collapsed to the pavement.
"Do not approach!" a military commander shouted through a bullhorn. "There could still be some danger." The cordon remained in place as the uncontrolled fire raged through the laboratory. No one came within twenty feet of Dr. Lann's still-smoldering body.
Watching the records, Anthea felt sick.
"His three children are in there," bellowed the incident commander. "They're a bigger threat than the doctor is. If they come out, your orders are to shoot to kill. Don't give them a chance to twist your minds. Remember, these are slans we're talking about. They could hypnotize you into opening fire on a comrade. We can't risk that. Slans are a danger to all humanity, and they must be wiped out."
But the laboratory building continued to be consumed by flames; the roof collapsed, timbers fell, but no one else emerged. Having seen what had happened to their father, Anthea couldn't blame them. The son and daughters of Dr. Lann were doomed, either way.
The brittle tape footage jumped. Anthea could feel her baby's agitation as he drank in the knowledge. She sensed an undertone in the air of the archives vault, a humming that grew louder. Before she could wonder about the strange background sensation, though, the next footage showed the same laboratory complex in daylight. The building had burned to the ground; only skeletal beams and blackened construction blocks remained.
Grim-faced workers sifted through the wreckage. Their cheeks were covered with soot, their eyes irritated from smoke as they reported to the commander. "There are no further bodies, sir. We've sifted the ashes. Dr. Lann must have been the only person inside the building."
"How could that be? We know the children were all in there. That's why they made this place into a fortress. They barricaded themselves so we couldn't get in."
"Commander! Over here!" one of the workers called.
The incident commander ran over to where three men wearing gloves and insulated jackets shoved a smoldering wooden crossbeam aside to reveal a previously hidden metal hatch. "Is it a safe room? Are they holed up in there?"
One of the firemen laughed scornfully. "It would have been a pressure cooker in there. We might have a few well-done slans inside."
They undogged the hatch, opened it—and the commander cursed to see a tunnel leading down into a catacomb of
passageways. "You two men—go down there. Follow it! See where it leads."
The excavators looked at each other in nervous concern. "But what if the slans blast our brains?"
"Then shoot them before they have a chance." The incident commander shook his head, letting out a heavy sigh. "I doubt you'll find them, though. The slans went through a lot of trouble to build this barricade. They wouldn't leave themselves with no escape."
A few moments later, the men came back up looking defeated but oddly relieved. "Sorry, Commander. The tunnel leads to several escape hatches that open directly into the city streets. Those three slans are long gone by now."
The commander chewed on his lip. "Then why didn't Dr. Lann escape with them?" He scratched his head. "He must have sacrificed himself so that we'd keep thinking the others were inside. He bought time for his children to get away. Now those dangerous slans are loose." His eyes took on a far-off, frightened look. "Who can tell what they'll do now?"