“They’re firing on us! We need support up here now!”
The bottom dropped out from underneath me again and bile crawled up my throat. I hit the wall again as the two helicopters disappeared for a minute behind the spire.
“We’re coming in now!”
The engine went up in pitch as the world tilted underneath us. Below, the roof of Alto Do Mundo was coming in very fast. Lights around a helipad began to flash, and I could make out soldiers as they ran past it to set up some kind of rig. One of them began to signal with a glowing baton.
“We’re going to return fire,” a voice crackled. “Hold your course!”
A flash went off on the rooftop and something hissed past the window next to me, trailing smoke behind it. A whistle sailed off into the distance, then was swallowed by the sound of the rotors.
“Was that a hit?” a voice asked.
“Negative. We missed them, but they’re moving off.”
I focused on Penny through my wet, tangled hair, and after a second she noticed me and met my eye. I reached out with one hand and groped; she moved closer and put her arm around me. As I shook, I felt her kiss me on top of the head.
A minute later we were on the ground, or the roof anyway. The soldiers flanked Penny and me as she helped me off the helicopter and across the helipad. The air was cold, but having solid ground under my feet and some fresh air made me feel better. I took a deep breath as more armed men arrived through a door about one hundred yards ahead and approached us. In no time, we were surrounded by men with guns.
Inside, the door thudded behind us and closed off the racket from the roof. The air was warm, and I rubbed my hands together, shivering as we followed the group of men to the elevator.
“Ai is waiting for you in the war room,” one of the men said. Penny nodded and took a minute to wipe my face as the car went down two floors. In the mirrored interior of the elevator car, I looked horrible; my skin was a pale, sickly gray, and there were dark circles under my eyes. My hair was a mess and caked with dried blood on one side. There was a gash on my forehead that was still wet, with a big knot underneath it.
“Get a doctor to meet us down there,” Penny told the man. “I want someone to look at that.” He nodded.
“I’m okay,” I said. She didn’t answer. She was in crisis mode and wouldn’t take no for an answer on anything, pretty much until she was out of it, so I just let it go.
The elevator doors opened and we followed the men down a long corridor, then through two doors with keypads to another hall where I could see a set of glass double doors up ahead. Through the glass I could see the room was dimly lit, and light from monitors flickered to make shadows. There was a crowd of people inside, sitting in leather chairs in a tight circle around a giant oval table in the middle of the room.
Ai was inside, I could sense her even though I hadn’t seen her yet. I could sense her whenever I was inside the building with her, but right then it was even more intense than usual. Unlike most people, her thoughts were almost fractured, with each shard clicking away, doing its own thing. They were all bound together in a master pattern, like bits of stained glass that formed a picture in a window. They said she was the next step in evolution, and maybe she was but sometimes I secretly thought she was more of an accident. No other mind was quite like hers, not even the other powerhouses that were in there humming around it.
I’d never actually been inside the war room before. Two guards stationed outside opened the doors so that Penny and I could go in. The armed men who’d escorted us down left us at the door, then turned and went back the way they came.
The inside was impressive. All of Ai’s top people were there, watching the far side of the room where a giant array of huge monitors were set up, each one displaying something different. In one, I saw General Osterhagen’s face looking back at me. Robin Raphael looked out from another one. A third, twice the size of the rest, showed the future model like a gas nebula floating in space.
Some of the other screens had faces I didn’t recognize, but most of them showed what I figured were live feeds from throughout the city. In one, I saw helicopters moving in between buildings, while people ran through the streets below. In another, I saw a vehicle on fire in the middle of a traffic jam, while soldiers tried to put it out. Everywhere I looked things were burning or smoking, and people were scared and hurt. It didn’t seem real. Less than five hours ago, everything had been normal.
“…the threat of the nukes is very real,” I heard Osterhagen say as we walked in.
“How did this happen?” someone else on one of the other screens snapped.
“Unlike the activation code, this security breach didn’t occur at the Stillwell compound. As best we can tell, he used contacts on the inside at Heinlein Industries to access the defense shield,” Osterhagen said.
“You’re saying this breach came from inside Heinlein Industries itself?”
“Heinlein Industries is connected to several other large military contractors, as well as the Department of Defense,” Osterhagen said. “In addition, they have their own defense satellite which is tied to the grid.”
“The Eye,” a woman said.
“They have the means for sophisticated satellite access from inside Heinlein,” Osterhagen said. “Somehow, someone on the inside was able to leverage that to find and exploit and tap into the main defense shield. We don’t know exactly how it was done yet, but it would have taken a detailed understanding of the satellite system, and a lot of time to figure out how to crack it. This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t come from Ang Chen. Fawkes had others inside Heinlein helping him. Defense system specialists, with high-level access.”
“How many have been compromised?”
“There’s no way to know,” Osterhagen said. “No one anticipated this move. It’s one of the most secure facilities in the UAC, and we weren’t watching Heinlein specifically.”
“Is this it?” the older man asked. “Is the satellite’s payload of ICBMs the catalyst for the event?”
“It’s the source of the destruction in the visions,” Mr. Raphael said. “It must be.”
“But do we know?” someone asked.
“General,” Ai said suddenly, and the rest of them stopped talking. “Can you regain control of the satellite?”
“I have a team on it,” he said. He nodded offscreen and a window popped up in the corner of the monitor along with him. In the window was the face of a pale, blond man with intense eyes and drawn cheeks.
“This is First Lieutenant Hans Vaggot.”
Eyes flashed when he said the name, and I sensed a kind of surge through the room, even from the group at the table who otherwise seemed to be in some kind of trance. The name Vaggot was tied to the very rare visions that took place inside the dark void, where most couldn’t see. I knew there were several possibilities who they thought might be the man in question, but it looked like this might be the one.
I watched his face, but it didn’t look familiar. In the vision, he was horribly deformed so it was impossible to know for sure if it was him. Those perfect, symmetrical features on the monitor didn’t seem like they could belong to the monster I’d seen, but …
“Regaining control of The Eye would be trickier,” Vaggot said calmly, “but we believe we can regain control of the nuclear satellite from here. We don’t have a time frame yet, but confidence is high that Fawkes will not be able to hold on to his nuclear option very long.”
“He doesn’t need very long,” someone said.
“Agreed,” Vaggot said. “But if he wanted to launch, he’d have launched by now so he’s waiting for something. If we can stay under his radar, he may lose this option before he has any kind of warning.”
“And if you don’t stay under his radar?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Osterhagen said. “We cannot leave those nukes under his control. We have to take them back despite the risk. A secondary defense satellite is standing by to take out The Eye once the nukes are off the table, and air teams are ready to scramble and knock out Heinlein’s ground defenses. After that, we’ll send troops in to mop up what’s left.”
As I watched Vaggot, I found myself drawn to him. I closed my eyes, and when I reached out, I found it was surprisingly easy to contact him. His presence was very strong to me, and like some I had run into in the past, he was extremely open to my will.
I cracked my eyelids and peered at his face on the screen while I concentrated on his distant little candle flame, the way Ai had helped me master. He wasn’t one of us; I could tell right away. He was sharp and intelligent,
