every time he moved, it rose, got more sinister… and they came closer.
AS CHARLES GUNN REACHED THE flight deck of TR-A4, the control surfaces flickered to life. Immediately, he turned on the plasma engine and watched the batteries charge. Because it was daylight, he’d need to use camouflage the whole way. He was going to Wilton himself. He wanted to be low and close, there just wasn’t any other way. Also, there was a possibility that he might be able to reach Mike using the ship’s super-secure sideband system that was capable of keeping TRs around the world in touch with each other, and was not accessible to outside tracking.
Henry was working on the scalar weapon orders. He’d probably be able to start pulsing in about an hour— unless, of course, the president, who was by no means stupid, had taken steps to close the many back doors into the Pentagon’s operations system.
“Charge,” the plane said in its soft female voice.
“Deploy shield.”
“Done.”
He hit the button on his throat intercom. “How do I look?”
“You’re ready to proceed, sir.”
“Open the doors.”
As he watched the monitor, the huge hangar doors opened. He would move out, then go straight up to minimize the number of people who would observe a very strange phenomenon—a gigantic triangular shadow, apparently cast by nothing. A close look would reveal the ship, but protocol required daylight takeoff to use full plasma and all fans to ascend to fourteen hundred feet immediately. At this altitude, the shadow would be too diffuse to be seen except from the air, and the air above Andrews was, because of this operation, at present entirely clear of aircraft.
“Sir,” came a voice in his earphone, “return to the hangar, please, sir.”
It was base ATC. What in the world were they doing interfering? “Excuse me?”
“We have new orders, sir. TRs are grounded effective immediately.”
The president had closed the operation down. Charles acted with characteristic speed and decision: he immediately took the TR up. Inside of thirty seconds, it was completely undetectable, not by radar, not visually, not in any way at all.
Incredibly, his cell phone rang. For a moment, he was furious. Voices inside the TR were damped, but if Andrews had deployed its sonic scanners, they might pick up that ring. He fought it out of his pocket and opened it.
“Charles, I’m being arrested,” Vorona’s voice said. “He’s pulling us in, all of us.”
Charles thought fast. Then he saw, instantly, just how to contain this. “Henry, stay calm. Do you have the scalar’s codes?”
“Yeah, but they’re busting in my door right now!”
“Give me the codes.”
“This isn’t a safe line, this is—”
“Do it!”
“Code of the day is B Bravo C Charlie Z Zero G Gremlin N, then one niner one in six three three eight nanosecond timed sequence.”
The line disconnected. Okay, his next act was to activate sideband. He had the TR moving away from Andrews at its top speed of 320 mph. “Mike?”
He waited. Nothing. He punched up the signal-seeking equipment. “This is TR-A4 for TR-A1. Mike?”
There was a carrier out there, but Mike wasn’t answering. Maybe he wasn’t aboard the TR.
Charles decided that he had to trust Mike to do his job. His first priority now was to save the Trust.
A TR was richly endowed with communications. In fact, an entire subset of controls for the scalar weapons would turn on as soon as it was fully deployed. This way, a TR could stand in close and watch the effect of scalar pulses that it was triggering, and make fine adjustments in their strength and angle while remaining entirely unaffected by the earthquakes they were causing on the ground just a few feet below.
Charles went into the plane’s operational manual and read as he flew, pressing buttons on a console.
Far overhead, rocket servos on the scalar weapon began once more to fire as his commands redeployed it. He had no idea that the grays had sabotaged its previous deployment, but this didn’t matter because it would seek to its new coordinates from wherever it happened to be. As he worked, its long, black snout swept back across the blue of the ocean, back to the land. It stopped, then, and with tiny bursts of the servos, began to move about as if it was hunting for something.
When a city appeared below it, the motion stopped.
On the TR, Charles watched a screen. He pressed buttons, and the image became clearer. He zoomed again, and the image was clearer still: he had pointed the scalar weapon directly at Washington, D.C.
He turned the plane on its axis and headed directly into the D.C. no-fly zone.
THIRTY-ONE
INSIDE THE GRAIN ELEVATOR, THREE figures, all dressed in silver protective gear with full hoods and gloves, moved carefully across the broad floor. Nobody on the outside was aware of the presence of Colonel Robert Langford and this specialized crew.
Dr. Simpson had phoned him while they were driving into town. “If he’s dead, you will need to collect tissue, Colonel Langford. I want cell-rich tissue. Do it the way the grays do, take the eyes, the lips, the genitals. We are going to need to build a clone of him.”
He’d wanted to ask why, but knew that he had no need to know, and therefore didn’t waste his breath. So what he had said was what duty demanded: “Yes, sir.”
“We’re looking at imminent structural failure, sir,” a voice crackled in Langford’s ears.
“I know it.” He lifted an electronic bullhorn to his lips. “LEWIS! LEWIS CREW!” His loss, in Rob’s opinion, would be greater than the loss of the gray that had departed the Indianapolis facility. Adam was so deceptive and complicated, there was no telling what anything they got from him really meant. But Lewis was as straight as they came, and he knew many secrets. Maybe his story about coming from another world was even true.
A rumble from above drew his attention. Like a gigantic missile, a flaming beam arched down and hit the floor in a shower of sparks. “Careful, guys,” Rob said, “we can’t afford any attrition, here.”
“I’ve got an organic mass.” Captain Forbes raised his viewer away from his face mask.
“Oxygen-level warning,” Airman Winkler announced, meaning that he had five minutes before compulsory withdrawal.
Langford moved through a forest of fallen, burning beams to reach Forbes. At his feet was a corpse. “Okay, let’s collect tissue and pull out.”
It was so badly burned that it looked more like a black log than a body.
“Holy moly, Colonel!”
“Take it easy! Gentlemen, let’s bag this.” It affected him deeply to see Lewis this burned. The poor guy was almost unrecognizable, but not completely. What a way to go, what a rotten death for that good man.
High above, a roar started.
“Move it! Now!”
PAULIE AND CONNER STOOD SIDE by side. Conner stayed close to the Warners, because they were not having these weird thoughts, not like the others, and they didn’t have shadows around them. They were shimmering with what he had come to see as normal colors of life.
The others came closer. He looked for his mom and dad, didn’t see them. The haze from the spray and the smoke was like a fog bank full of looming shadows, the roar of the fire and the rumble of hoses, and strange, echoing cries.
He dared not move, dared not call out. In his heart, though, he begged for his mom and dad, begged them to
