by M. R. Forbes
“This has to be the right place,” Tinker said. “If the reference were too obscure even the people who were supposed to be able to understand it wouldn’t. But the treasure isn’t on the Pilgrim. The USSF wouldn’t be stupid enough to bring both the key and the door with them to their new home.” He was silent for a moment while he thought, and then he looked directly at Natalia. “Are there other caverns down here or is this the extent of the complex?”
Natalia continued glaring at him in silence, still smoldering over the slap.
“I still have an active comm link with the Harpy, Mrs. Duke,” Tinker said. “I can send Captain Fahri back to San Francisco. He can blow the living hell out of your city, and maybe he’ll wind up killing someone else you care about.”
Natalia’s face went pale. She glanced at James for a moment before looking at Tinker. “There’s a door on the other side of the cavern, directly across from here. It leads into the facilities the USSF used while they were building the Pilgrim. It’s been a long time. Some of the passages are caved in and inaccessible. It’s possible what you’re looking for is buried behind a ton of rock.”
“Not only possible but likely,” Tinker said. “And maybe not by accident.”
He started walking away from the group, along the cavern wall.
“Where are you going, sir?” James asked.
Tinker didn’t respond. His right hand dropped, opening a small compartment on the side of his armor and retrieving a small cylinder. It was a matte black material like the alien sphere.
“What is that?” James asked.
Tinker still didn’t answer. He kept walking, staying along the side of the cavern with the cylinder in his hand.
“Tinker?” James said, starting after him. The other Liberators followed.
“This is it, James,” Tinker said. “This is the place. But the USSF didn’t want the artifact found too easily. Maybe after all these years, they expected it would never be found at all.”
“But you think we can find it?”
“I know we can. I made this device for that very purpose. It’s transmitting a portion of the key through a cycle of wavelengths. If the artifact is within range it will respond to the coded signal. It’ll reject it because it’s incomplete, but it will respond. Once it does, I’ll be able to isolate the direction of the response.”
“How far is the range?”
“Half a kilometer, give or take.”
“What if it’s buried under a ton of rock?”
“Then you’ll start digging.”
Tinker continued walking, picking up the pace as he traced the length of the cavern. Nearly an hour had passed by the time he came to a stop.
“I should have known,” he said.
“Sir?” James said.
They were standing directly under the bow of the Pilgrim, which from his vantage point was nothing more than a twenty-meter wide block of flat alloy. A small pile of rubble sat directly in front of them, having caved in from the forward part of the hangar at some point over the centuries. He imagined there would be more rock and debris spread across the top of the starship, the area where they were standing only spared because the vessel was still here instead of on Proxima.
He thought Tinker would approach the rubble and maybe use the strength of the armor’s hands to push some of the debris aside, to confirm that they were in the right place. Instead, Tinker knelt down, placing the cylinder on the ground. The floor was natural stone, hewn flat by the machines that had excavated the space. There was no evidence that it had ever been cut into. There were no seams. No flaws from one part of the floor to the next. If the artifact was responding, there had to be a separate entrance into an underground chamber buried beneath the floor.
Didn’t there?
“It’s here,” Tinker said, putting his palm on the ground. “The signal is weak but it’s here.”
“If the entrance is beneath the collapse, it’ll take weeks to get it out,” James said. “We don’t have weeks. Both Proxima Command and the Trust will have ships here within the next five days. Not to mention, Sheriff Duke’s people aren’t going to be idle while we – ”
“Be quiet,” Tinker snapped, his amplified voice echoing across the cavern. “What the hell is wrong with you, General? We’re on the verge of the greatest event in the history of humankind and you’re whining about complications?”
James’ fists clenched, his fury rising at Tinker’s admonishment.
“Do you want to hit me, James?” Tinker said, mocking him. He knew James’ limitations. “Do you want to punch me for being cruel to you?” He stood and pointed to the ground between them. “Take it out on the floor.”
“It’s solid rock,” James said.
“Turn on your infrared filter, stupid,” Tinker replied.
James’ face was on fire, but he did as Tinker said. The ground where Tinker was pointing changed, revealing a small stamp of the eagle and star logo, the paint invisible in the normal spectrum.
“It’s not a coincidence that mark is there,” he said, his anger starting to fade at the discovery. “How did you know?”
“The USSF would need some way to find it again. Like I said, if you want to punch something, punch the floor.”
James dropped to his knees in front of the painted mark, leaning over it. Then he drew his hand back, throwing it downward, his armored knuckles slamming into the stone.
It shattered beneath the blow, cracking and splintering and launching shards out and away from his fist. He was prepared to hit it again, but he paused to look at the damage he had done. The top level of stone was a facade, a three-centimeter thick layer that had been blended with the floor around it to look smooth and solid. The material beneath it looked like some sort of foam in a honeycomb structure. It had crumbled beneath the attack, leaving a layer of dust on top of what was clearly a metal hatch.
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
“Everything I’ve said would happen has happened, and still you doubt me, James,” Tinker said. “Finish clearing away the sealant layer. We’re almost there.”
Chapter 48
“It all looks okay to me, Sheriff,” Mia said, climbing out of the F-15’s rear seat. “But I’ve never actually seen anything like this before. The lines are all connected.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do.”
“I know,” Hayden said from the ground beside the fighter’s wing. “It’s still better than having you not find something obviously wrong because you didn’t take a look.”
They had parked a car beside it to use as a ladder to get up into it, and Mia used it to hop off the jet and stand in front of Hayden. “I can’t promise you won’t die if you use it.”
“I’m still hoping we won’t need to use it.”
“Me too,” Nathan said.
Hayden and Nathan scaled the car, going from the ground to the hood to the roof to the wing. Hayden dropped into the rear seat of the fighter, taking a deep breath. It wasn’t like he wanted to jump out of another aircraft. With any luck, there would be some flat ground to land on. Even a rough landing would be better than ejecting.
Sheriff Kin and a group of deputies were still with the fighter, and they clapped and cheered for him as he sat down and buckled himself in, grabbing the flight helmet and sliding it over his head.
“Go get them, Sheriff!” they cried, along with, “Kick his ass for me!”
The canopy started to close, the engines whining as they began to come alive. The fit in the seat was tighter now that he was more heavily armed, the revolvers on his hips digging into his sides.
“Can you give me an idea where we’re going?” Nathan asked through the helmet’s communications link.
“Southeast,” Hayden said as the car beneath them rolled back and out of their way. “About six degrees in a straight line. Stay low and we won’t miss it.”
“Roger. Here we go.”
The engine changed pitch, and the F-15 rolled forward. They didn’
t have much distance left on the road, so Nathan turned the jet around in a tight circle until it was facing west.
Hayden waved to the officers one last time as the fighter quickly accelerated, racing down the street and into the sky. His people had instructions of their own to follow in case he didn’t come back.
He hated to admit it, but he was more than a little worried he wouldn’t.
Nathan adjusted their flight path a few degrees to the southeast and then he opened the throttle, pushing the fighter well past the sound barrier, cautious of the terrain in their path.
They raced above the landscape at a rate of speed that was both frightening and exhilarating. Hayden was sure the Centurion dropships were faster, but they always took high parabolic arcs from place to place to avoid detection. The speed felt completely different only a thousand meters above the floor.
Hayden watched the ground whip past beneath them, crossing over the farms and factories of the United Western Front not far beyond the capital city. They took a more direct route than the cleared highway leading up from Haven, shooting over abandoned towns and housing complexes, past open fields and overgrown greenery, forests and small bodies of water. There were occasional groups of people who froze and looked up to watch them streak past, but there were no trife anywhere nearby. The area was as safe as Edenrise. No, it was safer. It didn’t depend on an energy shield that could fail. It didn’t have an army waiting right outside to storm the gates.
He wondered if Tinker had taken note of that when he had passed over the landscape. He could almost picture Natalia trying to explain it to him. He could also imagine him listening with amused interest and then moving forward anyway. A world without trife he didn’t control wasn’t a world that fit into his messiah complex. It wasn’t a world that lined up with what he believed, or what the Others may have fooled him into believing.
The time passed slowly despite the blur of the ground below, each second an apparent hour in Hayden’s eagerness to reach their destination. He sat up higher in the rear seat as the green landscape started to fade to brown desert and rocky hills, the fighter closing on the target.
“Slow down,” he said. “We’re getting close.”
“Roger,” Nathan replied, easing back on the throttle. The jet slowed considerably as the remaining bits of green foliage retreated behind them. “Where are we?”
“The desert outside Haven,” he replied. “John Wayne is a reference to the word pilgrim. It was something he called people in his movies, a catchphrase that was popular in his time.”
“That’s a word, not a place,” Nathan said.
“It’s also a place. The Pilgrim is a generation ship that never made it off the planet. It was constructed in a large underground hangar and then overcome by the trife before it could launch.”
“How did you find it?”
“I didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a long story. Hopefully, I’ll have time to tell you the whole thing later.”
“Pozz that, Sheriff.”
“Let’s get some altitude. It’ll help us spot the site more easily.”
“Roger.”
Nathan angled the fighter skyward, gaining height in a hurry. It left more of the landscape visible beneath them, and Hayden scanned it for signs of the dirt path leading to the target.
He found it a short time later, a pair of ruts made by vehicles that had driven to and from the site over the last year, visible only from the sky. He pointed it out to Nathan, who angled the jet to follow.
It was only a few more minutes until Hayden saw the small building half-buried in the side of a rock-strewn hill that marked the entrance to the Pilgrim’s resting place.
Sitting within a hundred meters of it was a large, dark dropship.
“Target acquired,” Nathan said. “It looks like Tinker’s already here. I’m going to do a fly-by and see if I can spot a decent place to attempt a landing.”
“They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” Hayden replied, his heart thumping at the sight of Tinker’s ship. He had known it would be there, but knowing it and seeing it were two different things.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Top Gun. It was a movie. The same aircraft, now that I think about it. I guess we’re in the danger zone.”
Nathan adjusted the throttle, gaining a little more altitude and shooting past the site. He spent thirty seconds putting distance between them and the location before pulling a tight U-turn and coming back, slowing the fighter as he did.
They both scanned the ground. The terrain was mostly rocky and uneven, but there was a small rut about two klicks from the site that Hayden thought looked decent.
“What about over there?” he asked. “On your left, sixty degrees down.”
Nathan’s head shifted. “Yeah, that might—shit!”
A shrill beep blared into Hayden’s helmet at the same time Nathan starting cursing. He saw the trouble a second later, a streak rising from beneath Tinker’s dropship.
“Hold on, Sheriff,” Nathan said, barely giving him notice before the jet banked hard to the right, rolling over and turning into a sharp descent. G-forces shoved hard into him, pushing his skin taut against his face. The rocket shot past, missing by nearly a dozen meters. Hayden turned his head to watch it go by, able to see it when it started to vector back around.
“We haven’t lost it,” Hayden said.
“I know,” Nathan replied. “I wish I knew what all these triggers on the stick and throttle do.”
“Only one way to find out.”
Nathan didn’t reply verbally. Instead, he started frantically tapping the buttons, hoping something good would happen.
A dull roar sounded for a moment beneath them, rounds blasting out from somewhere below the cockpit. For a few seconds that was the only thing that happened. The beeping returned, and Hayden looked down at the screens in front of his seat, noting one of them showed the position of the incoming missile.
It was close. Too damn close.
“Stacker!” he shouted.
Nathan banked the fighter hard, ascending this time and pushing the throttle. The jet shook as it tried to make the turn, heavy g-forces pressing hard into both of them. Hayden felt his breath vanish beneath the maneuver, but he heard something happen on the fighter. He forced his head to the side to look back and noticed a pair of flares ignite between them and the missile. The rocket hit one of them and exploded.
“I think I figured it out,” Nathan said, leveling the fighter off.
Hayden looked back to the ground, finding the dropship a good five kilometers off the right side.
“Good thing,” Hayden said. “We’ve got incoming.”
The dropship was starting to gain altitude.
Chapter 49
“Shit,” Nathan said, watching as a cloud of dust spread around the Harpy, the vectoring thrusters pushing it higher into the sky. “Hold on Sheriff. I’m going in.”
“Going in?” Sheriff Duke replied behind him, his voice tense.
“I don’t know if this thing can outmaneuver that thing,” he said. “It’s most vulnerable while it’s lifting off.”
He adjusted the stick, banking the jet fighter until it was headed straight toward the Harpy.
Green lines and circles filled the view in the canopy ahead of him, the heads-up display trying to relay all kinds of quick data. He didn’t understand most of it, save for the targeting reticle near the center and the slightly larger circle around it. A green square locked onto the Harpy as he put it in the circle.
He lowered the throttle and pushed the fighter into the descent, swooping down toward the dropship. He used the thumb trigger on the stick to change a menu in a small screen to his right, selecting something called an AIM-120. A moment later, the green square around the Harpy turned red, and he switched to the rear trigger, tapping it.
Nothing happened.
“Shit,” he cursed, keeping th
is heading. The Harpy was rotating in place, turning to face him. No doubt the pilot had seen him coming their way.
“What’s wrong?” Hayden asked.
“I thought I knew what I was doing,” Nathan replied, tapping the trigger again. “Come on damn it.”
“Pull out, Stacker,” Hayden suggested.
“No. Come on.” He pressed down hard on the trigger, holding it and hoping something would happen. The Harpy was getting big in front of them, and its bow was swinging forward.
A second screen ahead of him changed, one of the missiles on the underside of the wings flashing. Then it detached from the fighter and shot ahead, streaking toward the Harpy. Nathan almost cheered as he yanked hard on the stick, pulling the fighter up and away.
The desire to cheer faded as quickly as it came, the Harpy’s plasma cannon belching superheated gas into the missile and detonating it well short of its target.
“We missed,” Hayden said.
“I know,” Nathan replied. “We have to try again.”
He pushed the throttle, sending the fighter streaking across the sky above the desert. He looked back over his shoulder and down to the Harpy just as it engaged its main thrusters, shooting forward and up, slipping the tail sideways and turning to give chase.
“Hold on, Sheriff.”
“You said that already.”
Nathan pushed the stick forward, throwing the fighter into a sharp descent. A large bolt of plasma launched from the Harpy at the same time, zipping past them where the fighter had been a moment before.
The F-15 plunged toward the floor, gaining speed as it dropped. Nathan watched the ground approaching in a hurry, hoping his instinctive feel for the aircraft’s capabilities was accurate. The Harpy continued to chase, following them down.
“Its right behind us,” Hayden said.
Nathan banked to the right, barely avoiding a plasma bolt. He leveled and pulled back on the stick, pushing the fighter to get back into a climb. The pressure hurt his limbs, and he had a feeling if he were human and if Hayden hadn’t been given the compound, it would have been more than they could take. He clenched his teeth, bringing the fighter in a deep arc and rising again, getting back up and over the Harpy and leaving the dropship to match the maneuver.