by Terry Mixon
“Looks can be deceiving,” she said, closing the door behind Sandra. “Something odd is going on, Doctor. Something more than we’ve already seen.”
“Come over to the chair, have a seat, and call me Todd, like I said last time. What have you noticed?”
She sat in the indicated seat and crossed her legs. “I’m younger than I was before. I keep in good shape, but I can tell the difference between my mid-thirties and my mid-twenties. Also, I can now shoot a flechette pistol like a damned champ. I was never that good with things like that before, so I’m really at a loss there.”
“The latter does seem a little off,” he admitted. “I suspected the age difference based on what Harry told us he’d seen with his mother. She looked as if she were physically in her mid-twenties when he last encountered her as well.”
Jess felt her lips compress. “Don’t you think you should’ve mentioned that earlier?”
“I’m trying to get a handle on this too,” Todd said somewhat defensively. “Her age change was dramatic, where yours was more subtle. Those people that don’t already know you well probably wouldn’t have picked up on it.”
He held up a hand before she could speak. “And before you rip my head off, I was going to tell you in the next day or so. We’re just trying to keep word of a fountain of youth to a minimum. Right now, only a couple of people know about Kathleen Bennett’s change.
“Even out of the people that saw her at the last fight, we suspect most of them didn’t know her well enough to even realize who she was. We wanted to let things settle out a bit before I called you back in for a more thorough examination.”
Jess sighed. “I want to know about changes to me when you do. It’s not fair to make me guess that something is wrong. You wanted to do some tests. Let’s get that started.”
He nodded, picked up a clipboard, and handed it to her. “Tell me what you see here.”
Jess examined the paper there and frowned. The writing wasn’t in English. The letters were in the Asharim script. She’d seen enough of them on Freedom Express that she was familiar with the shapes, if not the content.
Frighteningly though, she now understood the alien text. It was a set of instructions for opening the sarcophagus. The knowledge that she was reading something in the alien script frightened her deeply.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, waving the clipboard at him. “How can I read this?”
“I wasn’t sure that you’d be able to,” he admitted. “The legends we have about this device are sketchy at best. The Asharim only used it on themselves and their most trusted slaves. The old stories spoke about miraculous knowledge but didn’t give many details. They did say you’d be able to read the Asharim language, so that was a good start for my testing.
“What we don’t know is how deep the knowledge goes. Can you only read it, or do you have other hidden knowledge, too? It seems you have familiarity with flechette pistols. What about this?”
He reached behind the sarcophagus, pulled out one of the heavy-worlder battle rifles, and handed it to her.
The first thing she did was flip it over so that the muzzle wasn’t pointing at anything important and check to see if it was loaded. It wasn’t. And only then did she realize she had no idea how she’d known to do that.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked in a whisper.
Todd reached over and took the weapon from her, placing it back where he’d gotten it. “I think the device implanted some skills to go along with the language lessons. The fact you know about the heavy-worlder weapons tells me that it was angled to be useful to their warrior slaves. Perhaps the last setting was what they used on one of them.
“Or maybe it was set to drop everything in its memory banks. I don’t speak Asharim, and I’m still working my way through what I’m seeing. I’ve got some other tests to run, but at this point I’d say you’re going to have a lot of surprising moments over the next few months where you realize you can do something new.”
“Well isn’t that just peachy?” Jess asked rhetorically, annoyed in spite of the potential upsides. “Are we sure that I’m still me? That’s what you were worried about, weren’t you? That the machine changed me.”
He waved away her concerns. “No. We knew you were you right away. Even the old legends don’t talk about the process changing people like that. Don’t fear that you’ve got secret programming in your head. That didn’t happen.
“On the other hand, we’re going to be testing you on a lot of different things over the next few weeks. I can’t imagine what you know that we don’t, but it could be the spark for a number of breakthroughs with recovered equipment.”
“That’s all fine and good, but she needs time to recover from the shock,” Sandra said firmly. “Enough poking and prodding.”
“I haven’t even started poking and prodding,” Todd objected mildly.
“And it can wait,” the sniper snapped. “She has to have time to get used to this. Besides, I want her to come back to the French base with me. I’ve got to see her shoot for myself.”
Jess rolled her eyes. “I don’t have time to play, Sandra. Maybe later. For now, let’s see if I can figure out how to get some information out of the sarcophagus. I want to know what it did to me, and that means finding the settings it used and deciphering them.”
Brenda Cabot walked into the small park, even though she damned well knew that Queen had people watching it. Meeting him was a calculated risk but one she had to take. The situation was too dire to let paranoia convince her that he was lying about the parley.
Besides, if he screwed with her, she’d have her own people on hand to extract her. Trust only went so far.
The trees were pretty this time of year. The green leaves were bright, and the scent of new growth was in the air. It was nice.
As they’d agreed, he was sitting alone on a bench, watching the birds curiously. He hadn’t bothered to clear the park of visitors, so there were a lot of mothers and kids around.
And a few FBI agents. She spotted them by the way they moved. After all, until just recently, she’d been one of them.
She set her bag on the ground beside the bench and sat next to Queen without speaking.
“I can’t remember the last time I sat and watched the pigeons,” he said, sounding somewhat bemused. “Sky rats, my mother used to call them. She wouldn’t let us feed them. Said that would only make them hound us for more.”
“Seagulls are like that, too,” she responded with a nod. “Only more demanding. Thanks for making the time to meet with me. And not having Agent Pembroke arrest me, since I know that he’s in the plumbing van up the street listening in. Seriously? A plumbing van? Cliché much?”
Queen raised his gaze to her face and smirked a little. “That’s going to piss him off. He was certain that you’d miss him.”
“Not in that van. Seriously though, I know you have no reason to trust me and plenty of other trouble on your plate, so I appreciate you offering to parley.”
“I had to look up the legalities of meeting with a wanted felon,” he admitted. “‘Parley’ is an interesting word with Medieval implications that the law doesn’t quite cover. Enemies meeting on the field of battle to negotiate a truce or surrender. Are you giving up, Agent Cabot?”
“Hardly, but neither one of us needs an additional enemy right now. You have China on your plate, and I have the heavy-worlders.”
Queen quirked an eyebrow at her. “The heavy-worlders are done. You moved them to New Zealand, according to the people I have there.”
He made it sound as if he had people with authority on the ground in the South Pacific nation, but she knew they had the only US Navy ship impounded there, and the New Zealanders had only allowed some of the ship’s crew to stay in the base as observers after Lieutenant Commander Karl Krueger and his people had helped to fight the heavy-worlders.
Not that she intended to rub that in his face, true though it was.
“They were
only the first of many, unless I can stop them at the source,” Brenda said sourly. “We think we’ve locked them out of the base in France—which I also know you know about in general terms—but there are other bases on Earth that no one has found yet. If they come through in force before we can secure them, humanity is toast.”
“We’d be happy to assist you with that.”
“I’m sure you would, but trust is earned, not given. Thirty years ago, I’d believe the US government would have the best interests of the human race at least somewhere on their radar. Not now. It’s an oligarchy in everything but name.
“Still, neither Jessica Cook, Harry Rogers, nor I believe we can do this alone. So, that being said, we’re going to reach out a hand and hope you have enough enlightened self-interest not to bite it off.”
“How is Miss Cook?” he asked, a genuine look of concern on his face. “Commander Krueger said that she’d been critically injured, but I know that you have access to miraculous healing technology. My compliments again to Doctor Granger, by the way. If I didn’t know that I’d been shot, I’d never have believe it after he healed me.”
“She’s up and about. Good as new. In fact, her exploits are one of the things I wanted to talk with you about.”
She relayed how Harry and Jess had met with Clayton Rogers’s personal assistant and how they’d been attacked. She left out any mention of the other woman’s strange new capabilities.
Queen nodded as she spoke but held his comments until she had finished. “I heard about the attack, though I had no idea who was involved, and the FBI is assisting with that. I was sure it had something to do with the Chinese. Why are they interested in Rogers or Cook?”
“I’m not sure they are,” she said slowly. “I think they might have been looking for me.”
That made the secretary of state blink. “Why would the Chinese be looking for you?”
“Those people Rogers killed during the escape seem to be of heavy-worlder extraction. We think there is a group similar to mine based in China, only they are descended from survivors from the other side of the fighting a thousand years ago.
“We had no idea they existed, and they didn’t know about us. Now they do, probably from having spies in the US government like we do. They’re probably the ones behind the attack on Area 51, though they had to have had Chinese government sanction. Hell, they’re probably pulling the strings over there.”
Queen grunted as if he’d been punched in the gut. “That’s an unpleasant bit of supposition, but I suppose it can be verified easily enough. Some of Krueger’s troops came back with blood on them, so we can do a DNA screen for heavy-worlders. Shit, we should do it in all critical areas to flush out spies.”
“I wouldn’t count on all the spies being of heavy-worlder extraction,” she cautioned. “They can probably recruit as well as we can.
“In any case, they’re almost certainly the ones blocking you from getting into space. They want the tech because they almost certainly don’t have a portable gate or access to a permanent one. We’ve got to keep things that way, too.”
“Well, they certainly aren’t going to get anything from us,” he said, disgust obvious in his tone. “Not after they blew it all up. I told their ambassador that a lot survived, but in truth they got it all. Some of the scientists survived, but all the hardware is gone.
“I assume that means they’re on the way to Mars with a lot of technology that we can’t match and that they intended to take the Mars base Rogers found inside Olympus Mons.”
That was a guess on his part, she was sure, but not too big a leap. Might as well throw him a bone.
“Yes. The base inside the Olympus Mons caldera is huge and filled with functioning tech. We’re sure that the Chinese spacecraft is manned by people from this heavy-worlder group and that they have tech with them that will make it hard to deal with them in space, using what Harry has there. That means we’re going to have to deal with them before they arrive and hope we can take them out before they blow up Liberty Station.”
The interplanetary spaceship that Clayton Rogers had built was in orbit around Mars and had no weapons at all, much less any that could deal with Asharim tech. They’d have to run away if they wanted to avoid an engagement that would see them destroyed. At least the Humanity Unlimited ship was far faster in space than the Chinese one.
“Once again, I might be able to help with that, in exchange for some consideration,” Queen said.
“Harry might accept that, once it’s negotiated in front of witnesses,” she said. “He’s going to return to New Zealand to deal with the mess his father left behind. He’s also going to take the opportunity to talk with the alliance there. I suggest you have someone that can speak for you present. Someone that the New Zealanders respect.”
“You mean Commander Krueger. He’s not a diplomat.”
“You say that as if it’s a flaw. If he says something, they’ll be much more inclined to believe him than one of your regular weasels. Oh, and be aware that the UN is sending a representative to examine the base. Word is going to get out about all this soon.”
“Perfect,” Queen muttered. “As if I don’t have enough on my plate with the Chinese.”
“How would you like to see them on their heels in the public spotlight?”
His gaze sharpened. “What does that mean?”
She related the news about the meeting with the senior Rogers’s assistant, including Kathleen Bennett’s will.
His eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure what you mean about it being bad for the Chinese. Bennett didn’t have a pot to piss in, and neither did Clayton Rogers.”
“So you’ve been saying. Is that the story you want to relay to the world when this goes wide? Or would it better suit your public image to have the inheritance go through? Harry doesn’t need the spaceport in Mexico. He does want his ship. Why not trade? Take it out of Chinese hands in a big show that leaves them looking like idiots.”
Queen sat back and stared into the distance. “Let Rogers have it all and make the Chinese look like thieves. And allow Miss Cook to have what would more appropriately go to the company. That has some appeal, and as you say, the mundane property is of far less interest after everything that’s happened.
“We’d want something in exchange, though. A real technology transfer, including knowhow. An actual agreement on how everything is divided up, including control of these gates. We can’t just have people running all over the universe when the Asharim and their minions are out there somewhere.”
“That can be worked out in New Zealand,” Brenda said. “I’ll want something similar for my people. We actually love the US and have no desire to fight you. I’ll even make a down payment on my end right now to show good faith.”
With that, she picked up the bag she’d brought with her and handed it over.
He opened it up, and blue light from the power cube she’d stolen when she’d kidnapped him washed over his face as his eyes widened.
“We’ll also hand over some other tech and someone you already know to help you with it. Victor Holyfield is on your radar, and we know you’ve been asking questions about him. Why don’t I assign him as your liaison?”
Queen considered her for a long moment and then nodded. “We’ll have some hard negotiation on the details, but I’ll accept the offer provisionally. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll turn young Victor back over to you rather than holding him.”
“I can live with that,” she said. “Welcome to the big leagues, Mister Secretary. Let’s see if we can’t screw those Chinese bastards over.”
6
Harry stepped through the quantum gate and into the ruined New Zealand base with Jess and Sandra beside him. Tearing his partner out of Doctor Granger’s clutches had proven surprisingly challenging. His friend had put up a spirited argument before he’d worn her down.
Molly Goodwin, the woman who’d been leading the search and rescue operation for his late father, was waiting for them, st
anding beside Kevin McHugh, Brenda’s Asharim gate expert.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that,” Molly admitted in a hushed tone.
The tall, gangly, bald man with purple-tinted, round-lensed glasses standing beside her grinned. “It’s wild,” he agreed. “Wait till you can see some of the other cool stuff out there.”
She gave the man an odd look. “I don’t see myself wandering all over the universe. I’m not even sure how I ended up being my government’s representative here.”
“That’s because you’re in the know,” he confided. “They’re not going to tell just anybody about this place if they don’t have to. The fact that you’re already clued in makes you the perfect person to interface with us.”
“If you say so.”
She turned to face him. “Welcome back to New Zealand, Mr. Rogers. I’d ask if you had a good trip, but that seems kind of redundant when it only took a fraction of a second for you to get from the United States to here.”
He shook her hand. “You’d think, but it’s still good to be back in New Zealand. I feel like someone is hunting me when I’m in the United States, probably with good reason. How are our unwilling guests doing?”
The woman shrugged slightly. “As well as one could expect, I suppose. They haven’t caused us any trouble, but that’s not lulling us into a false sense of security. We still have them under heavy guard.
“That mainly means using the soldiers from that U.S. Navy ship, and the few of our own people that we brought into the project to fight them.
“We cleared out a couple of levels in the middle of the base and have them blocked from getting to the stairs. We’ve set up a heavy weapons emplacement on the top floor to keep them from escaping, as well as one in the corridor outside the stairs on this level to keep them from reaching the gates.”