by Gini Koch
“Eddy? You either tell me, right now, why Chuckie has you listed as his immediate backup when things are beyond dire, or I will kick you in the balls so hard that you’ll wish you’d never, ever, heard of the term U.F.O.”
Stryker grinned. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
I knew I wasn’t the only one gaping. “Excuse me? That was the protocol?”
He laughed. “For you, yeah.” Stryker shrugged. “What can I say? Chuck knows you really well.”
Yi
CHAPTER 69
BEFORE I COULD COME UP WITH a suitable retort, Stryker was giving orders. All the hackers raced to their stations, easily spotted by the fact that they were the messiest parts of this particular high-security pigsty.
“How does Yuri not kill himself in here?” I asked as Omega Red lumbered to his station without incident, even though his path was scary cluttered.
Stryker shrugged. “Nanotechnology’s good for a lot of things.”
Bruno seemed to agree, or at least he liked the trash Omega Red had. He flapped up out of the way, settled into some of the mess like it was a nest, tucked his head under his wing, and, as far as I could tell, went to sleep. I chose to take this to mean I was safe and among friends.
“Whatever. Where are my men?”
“Geez, Kitty, give a guy a minute. I don’t remember you this impatient.”
“Do you remember me stating that my husband and oldest friend are missing?”
“You’ve checked the obvious places?” Stryker asked as he sat down at his console and started typing away on what looked like a megakeyboard. It had more than the standard qwerty stuff on it, by far.
“We’ve searched all the way to the Alpha Centauri solar system. There is no sign of Jeff or Chuckie. I think they’re on Earth but in one of the many rooms our enemies have constructed that appear to be impenetrable via normal and alien means.”
“Nice to know you think we can work miracles,” Stryker snapped.
“The Supreme Commander’s January report indicated that a number of subterrestrial locations that have been recently identified are priority one,” Henry shared. “So that’s where we’ve been focusing.”
“Dudes, really, what’s up with the Supreme Commander stuff? You’re aware that Chuckie’s laughing his butt off when he uses that title, right?”
“Sure,” Ravi replied. “But he is our Supreme Commander.”
Franklin cleared his throat. “Not if you’re on the U.S. Air Force’s payroll he’s not.”
I thought about the various chains of command I’d learned about over the past two-plus years. “Actually, Colonel, they might be right. But guys, really, lay off with the titles.”
Big George shrugged. “If we must. However, Henry’s right. There’s a network of sub-terrestrial strongholds we have yet to map completely.”
“Put them onscreen,” Franklin snapped. “Speaking as the Supreme Commander in attendance.”
Henry did some fast typing, and a map of the United States appeared. The map was hard to read since it covered all the U.S., but I spotted what I was confident were the locations of the Dome, the Dulce Science Center, and Caliente Base. Each was surrounded in red. “Why are those circled?”
“Chuck wants us to ignore them,” Stryker replied. There was a lot of color in the area where NASA and East Bases were and even more in the D.C. area.
“And you do?” I found this hard to believe, knowing Stryker as well as I did.
“Yeah, we do, ’cause Chuck monitors every damn thing we do, and he’s gotten really nasty in his old age.” Stryker sounded annoyed. Considering Chuckie and I were ten years younger than Stryker, this was amusing.
Stryker zoomed in on the D.C. area. Sure enough, there was the Embassy and the Pontifex’s residence, circled in red. Jeff and I were going to have a serious talk about this once I found and saved him and dealt with the people who’d, again, taken and most likely hurt my men.
However, there were a variety of locations marked in green. “Eddy, the green ones are the ones you guys are mapping?”
“The green circles are subterrestrial locations. The green lines are the access tunnels that connect the subterrestrial locations to each other and to upper-level exits and entrances. We’re mapping the entire network.” He zoomed out a bit. It was a rather impressive network of green lines. This boded.
“Trying to map,” Omega Red added. “They’re difficult for a variety of reasons.”
“The rooms or the tunnels?”
“The subterrestrial locations are more difficult than the access tunnels, but both have their own challenges,” Stryker said.
“Cloaking, lead walls, visual and audio disturbances,” Henry clarified. “Very little computer activity we can track.”
“Any more,” Ravi added. “Fortunately, we monitor and save everything, and so did our predecessors.”
“Predecessors?” Franklin sounded like he was going to get a migraine. “How many predecessors?”
Stryker shrugged. “Enough.” He looked over his shoulder at Franklin. “You’re in charge and this is a surprise?”
“These functions are not a surprise. Who’s doing them is the surprise.”
Stryker shrugged again. “You want the best for this kind of work? Accept that the best of our breed don’t join the military.”
“Yeah, most hackers aren’t into the up at five a.m., run twenty miles with a full pack on, and do two hundred pushups lifestyle.” They were into the sleep until noon, catch up on the latest internet porn, eat all the junk food they could manage, while spying on the world lifestyle. I looked around. Sure enough, there were some donuts. I checked them out. Fresh. Snagged one, took the box around and offered it to the rest of the gang. I got a dirty look from Stryker, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Glad you’re making sure we have fuel,” White said. “As always in these situations, I was a bit peckish.”
“Donuts are nice,” Tito agreed. “However, we’re not much of anywhere, Kitty.”
I looked at the map again. “I think we are. ACE said Christopher was looking the wrong way. Since he was looking all over the planet and in two solar systems, Christopher and I both figure ACE didn’t mean that Christopher just needed to work harder and try to reach another galaxy. Oh, and note how many of the ones with green circles radiate out from the one with the red circle that happens to correlate to where many of us now live.”
“Seven,” Buchanan said. “Nice to see you’re keeping on top of things.”
“You’re almost as funny as Chuckie and Mister White. Big George, how far are you into any of these?” I pointed to the green circles near the Embassy. There were others, dotted all over the globe, but these seemed the most likely targets.
Of course, “near” was a relative term, because maps always made things seem closer than they actually were. I assumed the circle nearest to the Embassy was the remains of the Secret Lab where Amy’s father and his cronies had done their horrible and horribly successful experiments. The others were farther away, and none were in a straight line from the others.
“As noted, in the D.C. area, we’ve identified and located seven rooms,” Big George said, rolling his pointer over different points of the map. “We call them rooms, but they could be a series of rooms, caverns, something else that has a general cube shape. But they’re not tunnels, because we can actually enter the tunnels and confirm structure.”
“We call them dead zones until we can confirm their structure,” Henry added. “Because we can’t read anything within them, so it’s like they’re dead to our equipment.”
“Henry, I think everyone with me understood ‘dead zone’ without the condescending explanation. But it’s nice to see you’re still the fun party dude I remember.”
“One of the D.C. dead zones, the one nearest to your Embassy, was declared destroyed by Chuck, but we mapped its area as best we could as well,” Big George went on quickly, pointer on the green circle closest to the Embassy. H
e rolled the pointer. “We feel there’s another one in this area, but haven’t finalized mapping.”
The one Big George’s pointer was now on seemed to be within or near to the metro area of D.C. But in order to show the dead zones all on one screen, the map was small enough that I couldn’t really make out city names or exact locations. However, the others were all farther away, and one, per the map, appeared to actually be in the Atlantic. I presumed under the ocean floor, but I put nothing past the Club of Evil Super-Geniuses these days.
“So, by mapping you mean what, exactly?”
“ We send sonar, infrared, electronic, and other forms of probes and scanning through the earth,” Omega Red explained. “Areas our equipment’s unable to access in some way are declared dead zones. Some are just dense rock. But others are clearly structures or constructs of some kind, because their shapes are too regular.”
“Because of the tunnel under the American Centaurion Embassy, we were able to begin exploration, which also allowed us a way to determine how to spot either a tunnel or what we’re choosing to assume is a room,” Stryker added.
“So, the dead zones you’ve mapped—have you entered any of them?”
“We haven’t been able to determine how to breach any dead zones yet,” Henry admitted. “Only the tunnels. They’re easier. They’re hidden from us, but not to the same degree as the rooms.” He paused, a little too obviously.
“Okay, fine. Explain how they’re not hidden in the same degree as the presumed rooms.”
Henry looked like I’d just offered to have sex with him. Had to give Hacker International this—it was easy to make these guys happy. “The tunnels don’t have the same level of blocking. It’s more like what’s around certain areas Chuck doesn’t want us probing.”
“Areas in, say, New Mexico and Arizona?”
“Among others.”
“Okay, super.” I’d ask about all the similar locations another time. “So the tunnels are cloaked in some way, but not like the dead zone areas. Fine, I guess that makes sense.” In the Bizarro World I now lived in, of course this made sense.
“We haven’t finished a full mapping of all the tunnels worldwide, either,” Big George said. “And until we map, we can’t send in agents to physically examine the system.”
“Chuck’s pissed about it, too,” Ravi added. “He doesn’t like the delay.”
We’d only discovered the Embassy’s secret lab four and a half months ago, so it wasn’t as though they’d been working on this for years. Figured I’d better check. “When did Chuckie start you on this particular project?”
“January, like I said already,” Stryker replied. I loved being right. “Four and a half months ago,” he added, sarcasm knob positioned around six on my scale. “We were working on some high-level transmissions prior to that.”
“How high level?” Franklin asked.
“Out of this world,” Big George replied.
Stryker nodded. “From systems past Alpha Centauri.”
Yi
CHAPTER 70
I LOOKED AT WHITE. “If we’ve heard them, then the folks on Alpha Four have heard them.”
White nodded. “Which means our enemies in that spaceship which left the range of our two solar systems undoubtedly know there are other inhabited planets and headed to one of them.”
“And found one, made friends, and are heading back for a really bitchin’ homecoming party.” I wanted to say we were screwed. I refused to accept it, though. “So, we prepare for another game of Interplanetary Risk. But all of this was set up well before LaRue and Ronaldo took to the stars.”
“You think Jeff and Chuck are in one of those dead-zone rooms, don’t you?” Naomi asked.
“I do indeed. Because I think one of the goals of all of the crap that’s been going on was to get us all out of the Embassy so Clarence could get in easily.” I looked at William. “Walter refused to leave. He’s not alone, he’s got plenty of Security A-Cs and Peregrines with him, and they’re in full lockdown.”
William smiled. “He’s a good kid.”
“Peregrines?” Stryker asked.
“Tell you later, Eddy.”
“But which dead zone?” Khalid asked. “There are six available, at least.”
“My bet is the last one, that the guys here haven’t finished with.”
“Feminine intuition?” White asked.
“Betting on how our luck usually runs is more like it.”
“There’s more than one pathway to that room,” Mona said. “At least if the schematic on the screen is accurate.”
“Yes, the tunnels are interconnected, at least the ones in D.C. and on the Eastern Seaboard are,” Big George said. “The others appear to be interconnected as well, but we haven’t been able to confirm fully yet. We’ve put security within every tunnel we’ve explored so far, with extra around where we’d say an entrance to a ‘room’ is. With even more security in the tunnel that leads to your Embassy. Per Chuck’s orders.” Walter had confirmed as much when the Peregrines had arrived.
“If the tunnels are also dead zones, how does the security work?”
“Well, as Henry said, they’re not as dead. So to speak. Once we found them, it was fairly simple to put high-frequency equipment in them. NASA was helpful, so we have a variety of equipment used to look out into space broadcasting from within the tunnels.”
“Fine. But if no one can get into these supposed rooms,” Tito asked patiently, “how are we going to get them out? How are we even going to guess what room they’re in? Or tell if they’re really in one of these dead-zone rooms at all?”
“Tito, you’re just batting a thousand on the tough questions, aren’t you? I don’t know. I’m hoping the Poofs can manage it. Somehow.”
“I think if they could, they’d have done it already,” Abigail said.
“Poofs?” Stryker asked.
“Tell you later, Eddy.” There had to be more. Chuckie wouldn’t have arranged to have Stryker as his backup for this reason only. “Eddy, how do you contact Chuckie?”
“He calls or comes by. Why?”
“You don’t have some special way of tracking him?” I knew Chuckie had been tagged by the A-C Wildlife Association, just like the rest of us, not that this had helped. But maybe the hackers had something even better.
“Not really. He’s the boss. He tracks us.”
“How?”
Stryker sighed and showed me his left wrist. It had a watch on it. “Nice to see the time. It’s only three in the afternoon? Wow, time drags when my guys are in danger.”
I got the long-suffering look. “It’s also a tracker, Kitty. We all have one.” The rest of Hacker International flashed their wrists. “We can’t take them off, either.”
White cleared his throat. “A-C technology.” The security stuff from NASA probably had a lot of A-C stuff in it too. Hoped that was a good thing.
“Gotcha. So, what level of testing has Chuckie done on those?” I got blank looks. “I mean, how often has he tried to reach you, where does he check from?”
“No idea,” Stryker said.
Omega Red cocked his head. “Chuck’s been with the operative teams when they’ve investigated the tunnels we’ve explored so far, including close proximity to the dead-zone rooms.”
“Yuri, you think Chuckie monitored you guys from there?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“Know where you’re going with this.” Ravi pulled off his watch and started doing some fiddling. “Going to take me a few minutes, though.”
“I thought you couldn’t take them off.”
“Still in contact with my skin,” Ravi answered. “As long as the contact is maintained, we don’t, ah, have to deal with consequences.”
“Consequences?”
Stryker gave me a long look. “You know him. What do you think the consequences are?”
I pondered. “Heads explode sort of thing?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Stryker said.
“And you agreed to that?”
“I’m not a traitor, and if someone got to me, considering what intel I’ve got, honestly, better I explode.”
“Eddy, I had no idea you were hero material.”
He shrugged. “It’s a living.”
“Where is he going with this?” Franklin asked.
“If it can transmit one way, it can transmit the other.” I just hoped that Chuckie still had on whatever it was he wore that allowed him to track Hacker International. The memory of all my guys stripped to the waist and hanging in a Parisian dungeon flashed through my mind. I got the worried feeling again, since I didn’t think Chuckie was going to carry this tracker in his underwear.
“What Kitty said,” Ravi muttered. “Do need to concentrate, since I don’t 뀀want my head to explode, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Carry on.” While Ravi was occupied, I turned my attention back to Stryker. “So, Eddy, let’s take the horrible idea that Chuckie’s gone for good. What, in that case, does he expect you to do?”
Stryker look
ed uncomfortable. “We don’t know he’s gone for good, Kitty.”
“We don’t know that he’s still alive, either. Let’s say we presume Chuckie’s dead. Share what, in that case, you’re supposed to do, or watch me react as if Chuckie and my husband are truly dead and gone. Trust me, you’d rather tell us what Chuckie expects you to do.”
Stryker didn’t seem eager to comply, if I took him not moving and looking uncomfortable to be clues.
“Do it, whatever it is, or I’ll have you up on charges.” Franklin was really pissed.
Stryker chose discretion over valor. “Fine.” He opened the lowest drawer on his desk and pulled out an envelope. It had “Contingency” written on it. I recognized the handwriting—I’d seen it since ninth grade.
Stryker opened the envelope. And stared at it. “What the hell?”