Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4)

by Brandt Legg

  “Maxim,” Booker said, a false smile projected in his tone. “Hope you weren’t kept waiting too long.”

  “We’re ready to deal for the girl,” the Judge said, not bothering with small talk.

  “I thought we had an understanding that we would talk about that once the doctors had cleared her to move.”

  “Events have necessitated that we alter the timetable.”

  “Really?” Booker said, watching the same satellite link that Rathmore and Murik were seeing. The Hornets’ stealth pursuit of his little Gulfstream had not been unexpected, and would be a problem, but he was still savoring Gale’s escape from Honolulu.

  “We’ll give you the girl for the Sphere.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you would,” Booker said, “but there’s only one person who would make that deal with you. Gale Asher, and she sure as hell doesn’t want her daughter permanently blinded.”

  “We have reason to believe the US government has a team of agents about to land in Fiji, and the hospital will be their first stop,” the Judge said. “I’ve also just spoken with the head of surgery at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and there is a protocol. There is a way to safely move her.”

  “Yes, I’ve spoken with people at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins, and they have said it can be done, but not without some risk.” Booker had been only a few minutes away from ordering a rescue mission on the hospital ever since Cira got out of surgery. He was aware of every possible option.

  “Some risk? Don’t you think the girl and her parents are way beyond ‘some risk?’ I mean the odds are quite good that none of them will make it out of this alive.”

  Booker glanced at the projections. Gale’s plane, still a few hours away from El Perdido, had enough fuel to land anywhere in the US southwest, California, and most of Mexico or Central America. He had assets, including AX agents, in countless possible landing areas. Anything was possible.

  “I won’t give you the Sphere,” Booker said.

  The Judge knew he couldn’t threaten to kill the girl or Booker would go to war. That was not something the Foundation could handle right now. They were ready to take Booker on once the Phoenix Initiative had launched, but not before.

  “We’ll take Gaines.”

  “And you think the father will sacrifice himself for his child?”

  “Who said anything about sacrifice?” the Judge said. “We can always use a brilliant man of his caliber at the Foundation. You have so many geniuses, why not trade that one?”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “I don’t know, but you’re talking to me, so there must be something.”

  Booker watched the shootout at the airport. The link covered only a few cameras, so his view was not optimal, but he saw Kruse go down.

  “Get her ready,” Booker said. “Be sure to follow the Bascom Palmer Eye protocols to the letter. No mistakes.”

  “So we have a deal. Gaines for the girl?”

  “I need to confirm a few things, but yes. Tentatively, we have a deal.”

  Chapter 38

  Gale looked out the window at the ocean below. The world seemed calm and beautiful, belying the turmoil she knew was swirling around her. “Cira, I’m so sorry,” she said softly as tears filled her eyes.

  The AX agent who had gotten her onto the plane looked across at her, silently asking if she was all right. Gale nodded and wiped her eyes, turning back to the window. She could almost feel the jets following them. She imagined the satellites tracking her every breath. Gale understood that the NSA had let the plane take off, and knew the reason—Rip and the Sphere. Booker would be cooking up some complex plan, a great escape, but she knew he’d never fly her to El Perdido and the Sphere, not with the entire resources of US intelligence agencies massed against them.

  She wondered if Cira was awake. Maybe they’re keeping her sedated. Is she dreaming of mommy, or maybe Winnie the Pooh? Is she holding her cat Earth? The thoughts were so painful Gale felt as if she’d swallowed broken glass. Her request to speak with Booker had so far yielded no results. It apparently wasn’t safe to speak with Rip either.

  Kruse must be dead, she thought. Even though he’d drugged her twice and forced her away from Cira, she knew he’d just been doing his job. She would miss the man who, along with Harmer, had kept them all safe for seven years.

  Harmer, she wondered. Is she still with Cira? How could such a crazy plan ever work? Hiding in the hospital. Poor Cira. Gale couldn’t stop her tears from flowing for the next half hour, until the agent told her Booker was on the line. It was a short call, and what he told her made her more anxious than ever, but at least there was hope. Everything depended on perfect timing and utilizing one of the untested secrets of the Sphere.

  The Sphere, an unpredictable swirling mass of energy that, somehow, the Cosegans had crafted into a usable entrance into all creation, offered them a chance. Relying on it was all they could do, but its awesome power thus far had proven difficult to harness.

  She recalled the time they had spent more than two months watching dinosaurs. No matter what they tried, it was only dinosaurs every day, day after day. After the first month, Booker found the top paleontologist and Rip met him in Hawaii. All the dinosaur data was transferred to INUs at the university where it was still being studied.

  Gale worried. What if the Sphere got stuck on dinosaurs again? Or tree frogs, or comets, or anything other than Cira?

  —O—

  “They let her go!?” Taz shouted into the phone. His fist of gold rings smashed into a plastic seat. He looked down at the one the Judge had given him a few years earlier, an inlay design of a mythical phoenix rising from flames. The next finger over held his father’s eagle.

  “Obviously they’re following her,” Stellard said, still standing by the fireplace.

  “And obviously Booker knows they are,” Taz countered.

  “I’m sure, but it buys time.”

  “Until what?” Taz asked. “Where the hell are they going to hide?”

  “I don’t know, but he’ll never lead them to the Sphere,” Stellard said. “On that front though, I do have a piece of extremely good news. Booker has agreed to give us Gaines in exchange for the daughter.”

  “Wow! That is incredible news. Surprisingly good. Can we trust Booker?” Taz asked.

  “Of course not, but Gaines and Asher are obviously willing to do anything to protect their daughter and get her back, and he’s acting to protect the Sphere.”

  “Gaines must have a way to lock it,” Taz said, then paused to follow a stray thought. “Hey, you don’t think it’s possible that Asher has the Sphere, do you?”

  “Why would Gaines have come to Hawaii without it?”

  “Who knows?” Taz said. “Maybe I’d better talk to Dabnowski again.”

  “Good idea,” Stellard agreed. “I’ve already got the people in Fiji working on readying the girl for the move. I’ll be back in touch as soon as we get a final go from Booker.”

  Taz headed toward the exit. His car and driver were waiting. Before he contacted Dabnowski, he thought he’d better spend at least ten minutes looking at the papers he’d left with him. There was certainly time, as Gale Asher was not coming back to Hawaii, and it would still be a couple of hours until Harmer arrived for questioning.

  Taz sat in the backseat with the windows down, a warm, fragrant breeze filling the car. He opened the case and was immediately intrigued by the lengthy title “Past and Future Time Exchange: A Method Through Space. Study and Review of the Cosega Sphere.” It was co-authored by Dabnowski and several other scientists, with input from the Inner Movement organization.

  As soon as Taz completed reading the first page, he ordered the driver to immediately return to the airport. “Get me on the next flight to the Big Island.”

  I’ve got to get to the Mauna Kea Observatories now!

  Chapter 39

  Rip came out of the black fog wondering who the woman was, wondering what this latest surprising ep
isode from the Sphere meant, and wondering how long he had to find the answers. As the otherworldly daze cleared, he immediately thought of Cira and Gale. Relief flowed through him as he realized his Sphere was there, safe, levitating where it had been left. It meant that the woman had her own. There really is another one!

  First he tried to reach Booker, but when that didn’t work, he went back to the Sphere. “Crying Man, where are you?” he asked out loud.

  What if the woman with the Sphere is a Cosegan? She might be trying to show me something. Maybe she has the answers —who were the Cosegans, where did they come from, why did they leave the Sphere, and what happened to them? The same questions he’d asked thousands of times in the past seven years. Rip was convinced that they could not stop the final four Divinations without first fully understanding the Sphere, and that was impossible until they answered the five mysteries. He had hundreds of others questions, but those five were the core to the conundrum.

  With Crying Man not responding, Rip wandered out onto the balcony and stared at the ocean. For so long, this view—what had become his deeply personal horizon—had always balanced him in both good and bad situations. Whether clouds or stars, blue, grey, or black . . . standing here in the constant breeze had always fed his soul.

  But as he passed an aluminum patio chair, his foot got tangled and he stumbled. Getting up, the chair leg caught in the deck railing, which made him slip against the wall. Rip kicked at the chair, twisting, clawing, smashing it against the stucco wall. Picking it up, pulling the vinyl straps that formed the seat, beating and punching until it was a twisted, broken heap. In a huff, Rip threw the remnants off the balcony and watched it crash onto the rocks below. He slid back to the floor, hands shaking, cuts and scrapes on his knuckles, wrists, and ankles.

  All he could see in the frustrated dismay that strangled him was Cira’s face. He could hear her saying “Daddy,” and remembered her first steps, hands raised in triumph. He saw her running to him whenever he came into a room, reading her books . . .

  His clenched fist pounded his thigh. “Where are you, sweetie . . . where are you?” Rip wallowed for minutes or hours, there was no way to measure time against such misery. Everything had been torn apart, taken from him, all but the Eysen, and that he would gladly trade to see his daughter smile again.

  A whooshing sound, coming from inside the skyroom, brought back his attention. Rip pulled himself off the deck as if collecting a broken thing from the scene of an accident. His steps were painful, slow, like he was trudging through crusty quicksand. Then he saw Crying Man.

  Part of him wanted to attack the Cosegan, to banish even his memory back across the eleven million years. Yet gazing at such a person, the purity of his eyes, the depth of emotions, knowledge, and experience radiating from a face seemingly spun from starlight, made anything other than adoration impossible. Rip knew he’d been falling apart, and believed that Crying Man was there to save him.

  “Thank you for coming,” Rip said, so happy to see the vision of the wise man projecting out of the Eysen, full size, vibrant and steady as the morning. “I don’t know what to do,” he continued, hearing his own voice shaky and weak. “For seven years, I’ve been trying to save the Eysen, trying to save the world . . . hoping to save the future.”

  Crying Man nodded.

  “Now all I want is to save my daughter.”

  He stared into Crying Man’s eyes. Layers of tears, oceans deep, gave his eyes the appearance of more than simple extensions of optical nerves. They spoke a language which conveyed the illusion of time.

  As with their previous wordless conversation, Rip felt Crying Man’s meaning. “Cira is safe.”

  “But the Foundation has her,” Rip whispered painfully.

  “She is safe.”

  Rip nodded. He believed him. Rip took a deep breath, relieved that someone or something more powerful than himself was watching over his daughter. After a few moments, Rip decided to push for everything. He didn’t know when, or if he would see Crying Man again, and wasn’t even sure he would have the Sphere much longer.

  “Tell me how to stop the Death Divinations.”

  Although Rip was ready to elaborate on what the Death Divinations were, Crying Man, not surprisingly, knew exactly what Rip meant. He shook his head slowly.

  Rip swallowed hard, his throat tight. The answer shocked him into silence. They can’t be stopped! He wanted to mourn, thought of screaming a dozen rage-filled protests as if it were Crying Man’s fault. Instead, he stared at the ancient figure, waiting for more, wishing for a change, a clarification.

  Nothing.

  “Then why?” Rip asked in a desperate voice. “Why did you leave the Spheres? Why let us see the future if we cannot change it?”

  “For help,” was the simple response.

  “But how does it help? Billions will die! This beautiful, horrible object contains the wisdom of the universe, the history of time, the damned dream of the future, and you mean to tell me I can’t find a way in all of that to stop a super plague, heal the eco-system, or prevent World War Three?”

  “Help.”

  “How does it help?” Make me understand. “Who is the woman with the other Sphere? Can she speak?” Rip considered for a moment that the woman he’d seen could have been the person who created, or at least programmed the Sphere he was looking at. It might have been the same one.

  Crying Man put his hands together and bowed slightly, then spread his arms full and wide, starting above his head and arcing out in a broad, wide reach. The motion opened a view. Rip, as if peering though an open window, looked through it. What he saw would forever change him.

  Chapter 40

  While Rathmore organized a team to uncover the leech siphoning NSA data, he simultaneously monitored reports from a separate team tracking Asher’s plane. The satellites and Navy Hornets kept easy tabs on the Gulfstream for several hours as it flew toward the west coast of the continental United States.

  “Are they crazy?” Rathmore asked after reviewing many projected flight paths for Gale’s plane. “They may be heading for San Diego. What do they think is going to happen when they land? That no one will notice?”

  “Maybe they’re going to try to sneak in under the radar and land on a smuggler’s strip somewhere in the California or Arizona desert,” Murik offered.

  The Conductor came back on their screen and interrupted the debate. “We’ve got a professor who’s willing to talk about UQP and the Sphere,” she said.

  It had been a steady stream of denials and refusals with one scientist after another. The stone wall of secrecy made the top officials at the NSA even more determined to crack the encryption. Rathmore was desperate to get one of the geniuses to spill what they’d been working on with Gaines and the Sphere. UQP, Booker’s Universe Quantum Physics, had previously been ridiculed by government scientists, but now it seemed it could prove to be the key, not just to finding the Sphere, but to actually understanding it.

  “There’s a break,” Murik said, clapping his hands triumphantly. Even Rathmore smiled at the news.

  “I warn you though,” the Conductor cautioned. “You may not like what he has to say. You damn sure probably won’t believe it.”

  The Conductor nodded to someone off camera and the view changed to a holding room in the Honolulu Federal building.

  “Professor Yamane, this is Claude Rathmore of the NSA and Quinn Murik of the CIA. I’m sorry we’re all talking to you on screens, but I’m at another location on the island,” she said, having abandoned the airport and returned to her temporary command center at Pearl Harbor. “But at least technology allows us to all be in the same room.”

  “I understand,” Professor Yamane said, scratching his bald head and shifting in the hard plastic seat.

  “Well, professor,” Rathmore began, “we appreciate your cooperating with us on this matter of national security.”

  “Oh, it’s more than national security,” Professor Yamane said, sniffling and w
iping his nose.

  “Meaning?” Rathmore asked.

  “The Eysen-Sphere is about global security . . . survival of the species, really,” Professor Yamane responded, urgency in his nasally voice.

  “Species?”

  “The human race,” Professor Yamane clarified. “If the Sphere is not handled carefully, it will lead to an extinction event.”

  Rathmore looked at Murik as a classmate might when hearing a lecture in another language for the first time.

  “How could the Sphere lead to the extinction of humans?” Murik asked the professor. “Last I checked, there were more than seven billion of us‒‒”

  “A little glass ball,” Rathmore interjected. “Even with all the legends I’ve heard about it, destroying the world with a tiny object like the Sphere would be impossible.”

  “Oh, the world will be fine. It’s the people who won’t be,” Professor Yamane corrected. “And it’s not the ‘glass ball’ that will destroy us.” The professor sniffed again and took a sip of hot liquid from a thick mug. “It’s humans that will end it. We’re going to do it to ourselves.”

  Rathmore turned his attention to another screen. Professor Yamane’s credentials rolled down it, including a long list of degrees, awards, papers published, and other accolades. Yamane, a microbiologist, had even been on a Presidential Committee on pandemic response preparedness.

  “What is a microbiologist doing involved with the Sphere anyway?” Rathmore asked.

  “Because of the future scenes,” Yamane replied.

  Rathmore looked at Murik again. “Why can’t this guy just answer a question in a way that doesn’t lead to more questions?”

  “Because he’s a scientist,” Murik replied, smiling. “Let me try. Professor, give us a little background about the Sphere and what your role with the project has been.”