Element Zero

Even as the storm outside caused the chopper to buck, I felt a pang in my chest. For a minute, I forgot about the rest—Fawkes, the arm, everything.

Faye is part of this, I said. She’s with Fawkes now. She’s close to him; you can’t use her.

Trust with revivors doesn’t hold the same connotation as it does for humans. I believe she was the one who compromised Heinlein’s security and allowed Fawkes access, he said. But something has happened since then and she’s no longer part of his network.

If she’s not on his network, then—

Trust me, Agent. Fawkes is trying very hard to reconnect her, and I’ll see to it that he succeeds, but only once we’re ready.

She’ll tell him—

She can’t tell him what she doesn’t know, and anyway, at the end of the day, she is a revivor. It doesn’t matter what she did before or why she did it. When I’m finished with her, you’ll have the access you need.

It was still hard for me to swallow. Everything that had happened, all those people dead and dying in the streets, all of it had happened with Faye standing at Fawkes’s side.

Agent?

I’m here, I said. Set it up.

Stand by, he said. I should have access shortly—

His message clipped off as the helicopter started to descend toward the building tops. On several of them, I could see groups of people bundled in coats and scarves that whipped in the wind. They were looking down at the city, at the streets below.

MacReady?

Down on the street, pedestrians looked up as we approached. Police blues flashed against the white of snowbanks where a group of officers waited, keeping a crowd of people from entering a strip mall whose windows had been smashed in.

The pilot chattered over the radio and was pointing down toward the street, but I didn’t hear him. In the corner of my eye, an FBI alert popped up:

IMMINENT ORBITAL STRIKE

The pilot and copilot looked at each other, and the pilot shouted into the radio. Before I could pull up the details, Alice cut back in.

Wachalowski, get out of the area now.

I just got an alert about an orbital strike. Is it an ICBM?

No. The DoD just detected a massive energy buildup in Heinlein’s orbital-defense satellite, The Eye. It’s going to fire in the next minute.

Fire at what? What kind of buildup?

They’re not sure what the target is, but this charge is off the charts. A spy satellite observing it saw it go into targeting mode two minutes ago. It looks like it’s focusing every lens it’s got on a common target that is outside of Heinlein’s security perimeter.

I brought up the specs for the satellite. It had more than one hundred lenses for striking multiple targets such as missiles, aircraft, or ground forces. Any one of them could generate a beam capable of incinerating a large vehicle or even a tank at only half capacity.

Can they stop it? I asked.

Not in time. A communication from Fawkes warned that if The Eye is destroyed, he’ll launch another—

The connection skipped, then cut out. A second later, the radio chatter on the helicopter cut out as well.

Something flashed and lit up the sky. A hole appeared in the clouds and a light shone there like a second sun. The hole blew out, until the clouds were gone and a huge, blinding beam of energy arced down toward the ground below.

The helicopter banked hard as I threw my hand in front of my eyes. Everything went white, and a loud thunder crack pounded in my ears. Spots danced in front of me as the white-hot light burned over the skyline and struck the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance.

The pilot screamed to the copilot, but I couldn’t hear anything over the racket outside. I stared in shock as a ball of fire engulfed the base of the tower and began to expand.

Clouds of glass blew out and rained down toward the street as the flames began to boil from the windows. The air rippled, and in seconds the base of the tower turned an angry, molten red.

The pilot was screaming to hold on. A blast of hot air rushed in as the beam writhed and arced through the night sky, setting the surrounding building tops ablaze. The helicopter began to shake violently, then fell into a slow spin.

Concrete and glass split under the waves of heat and tumbled down toward the streets below. Over everything else, I heard a low, earsplitting moan echo through the sky as the huge structure started to twist on its failing foundation.

The city reeled through the window as the helicopter’s spin got worse. As the remains of the CMC Tower whipped past the windshield, the arc of light flashed and went out, leaving a dark line to float in front of my eyes. The tower was lit up like white phosphorus, while a cloud of black smoke and fire blew out from around it in every direction.

The peak dropped down toward the other buildings it towered above, and then the mighty structure began to implode. As we spun around again, I saw it crumble, and begin a slow collapse down into the debris.

“We’re going down! I’m going to try to land her!” the pilot yelled. My stomach rolled as the deck jumped again, but he managed to stop the spin and stabilize us. The street below tilted at a steep angle as we whipped, dangerously close, past a mirrored building face.

“Hang on!”

The buildings tapered off up ahead where a large, flat area was carved out. It was the Stillwell Corps base. Security alerts began flashing as we passed into their airspace. The pilot was barking into the radio, requesting an emergency landing even as we began to drop.

“Negative! Negative!” a voice came back.

“We don’t have a choice! We’re coming in!”

A helipad was lit up on one of the buildings up ahead. At street level, I caught several bright flashes of gunfire as we banked around and began our descent.

“The security perimeter has been breached!” the voice on the radio said. “Repeat, our security perimeter has been breached!”

As we came back around toward the helipad, I saw more muzzle flashes from below, and when the helicopter’s floodlight washed over the street, I saw why: hundreds of bodies surged toward a chain-link fence whose gate had been forced open. Blood sprayed through the air as soldiers on the other side opened fire on them, but there were too many. Already they were breaking their way into the buildings on either side of the street.

The pilot veered off at the last second, struggling to keep control of the helicopter as we passed over the heads of the clawing mob. The copilot pointed out the windshield at another rooftop, farther into the base, past the fence.

The pilot switched off the radio, cutting off the screaming voice on the other end as he began to take us down.