But the armored column roared onward.
And then Wilkes could see the lead tanks falling up into the sky as well, as if they’d driven off a reverse cliff. Red taillights stabbed on the following Strykers as pieces of asphalt, parking meters, manhole covers, trees, grass, sculptures—everything, literally everything—ripped out of the ground and flung itself into the sky. There was the deafening sound of breaking glass as the facade of one of the tall buildings ripped away, but instead of collapsing, it up-lapsed—pouring into the air and shattering into thousands of pieces as people screamed in terror and fled deeper into their apartments.
The Strykers had screeched to a stop now on their eight large rubber tires, but as Wilkes watched, speechless, the tanks were clanging together like great bells and cresting the tops of twenty-story buildings—then falling up, up into the dawn sky, receding, shrinking smaller with every second.
And other vehicles and debris continued to follow them as though on a conveyor belt. The cracking sound of the concrete, as if the bones of a giant were being broken, rippled through Wilkes’s chest. He watched, paralyzed, as a whole section of Washington Boulevard—center meridian, sculptures, asphalt, and Stryker vehicles all—peeled up and came apart as they fell into the sky.
The remaining Strykers tried to turn or back away from the disaster, but the suspension of reality was racing them down the street—and winning. Men were piling out of the gridlocked Strykers now as their rear gates opened. They pulled off their packs and ran screaming away from another building facade ripping upward. Lampposts tore out of the ground; fire hydrants and sidewalks peeled up. Piping and electrical work from the streets dangled upward, their ends swinging as water poured into the heavens as well from a broken main. Soil hurtled upward, splashed through water, and came out mud on the other side.
Soldiers ran past Wilkes now, fear in their faces. He could barely hear them as he watched the sidewalk tearing up a hundred feet away. Soldiers there clawed at bicycle racks, but then the ground beneath it all gave way, the concrete cracked apart, and they spun screaming into the air, their cries receding.
Wilkes’s neck craned up to see a line of debris heading into the heavens. What he knew must be M1 tanks were tiny dots now, crumbs in a vast river.
And then he felt the pull, it started dragging him forward, and he finally came out of his paralysis. Too late.
Almost immediately the feeling of falling tripled, and he grabbed for the light post next to him. The Humvee in the street before him, along with fleeing infantryman, flew upward with the asphalt of the street beneath them, and then the concrete and gravel beneath that, and finally the soil, poured skyward.
As Wilkes held on, he suddenly saw the world differently. It was all clear to him now. What he’d always known as down no longer was down. The city was a great roof over his head.
And as he looked down, he could see that the sky was a yawning chasm beneath his feet. His grip weakened on the lamp pole, and finally it slipped from his fingers as he fell screaming into the vast emptiness below.
• • •
At Site R, Director of National Intelligence Kaye Monahan sat in a mission control center watching live satellite imagery of the operation under way in Detroit. The generals and intelligence directors around her gasped. She herself felt a tingling, almost detached feeling as she saw an entire battalion sucked up and hurled into the heavens, the streets and building fronts along with them.
Now there were fires as what appeared to be a gas main silently exploded.
A hush had gone over the control room.
But then someone said, “Pull them back. For God’s sake, pull back.”
A general next to her said, “Where’s the MK-54?”
“Lost, sir. We have no idea where it is.”
“My God.”
“We just lost a suitcase nuke.”
“Jesus.”
Monahan came out of her stupor and called to an operations officer. “What’s happening?”
The lieutenant colonel examined a radar screen and shook his head. “They appear to be falling up. The leading edge is above a hundred thousand feet already.” He looked up from the screen. “They’re falling off the planet. Apparently the BTC can control gravity.”
The gathered generals and intelligence directors let out a breath and wandered about the control room, trying to process what they were seeing.
A four-star general said, “We have no choice now. We’ll need to tell the president.”
The deputy director of the CIA scowled at him. “The last thing we need is politicians involved in this mess.”
The NSA deputy director nodded. “We can’t tell anyone about the BTC. If people find out how powerless civilian government is, there’ll be a political crisis.”
Monahan looked from one to another. “Then what do we do? We can’t do nothing.”
The deputy director of the CIA grimaced. “Maybe it’s what we should have been doing all along. Just leave them alone. Let things go back to the way they were.”
She looked up at the big satellite screen. The carnage seemed to be starting all over again miles out of town now as a whole artillery section began falling into the heavens, along with the farm fields in which they were deployed. The site was rapidly turning into a quarry.
Monahan pointed. “What the hell are people going to think, Mike? Half of the main drag in Detroit just fell into the sky in front of ten thousand witnesses.”
“The BTC jammed cell signals. Radio frequencies.”
“He’s right. There’s no television coverage. No YouTube video.”
“So what are you saying? They did the right thing?”
“They did sanitize the scene. There’s no wrecked military equipment to explain.”
She clenched her fists. “You people are unbelievable . . .”
“Kaye, be practical. This is a monumental disaster—no doubt about it. But we won’t help things by making them worse. Hundreds of young men and women are dead. They died trying to defend their country—but they lost. For now. And it doesn’t help anyone if we reveal that.”
She collapsed in a leather chair. “We need to inform the president.”
“No. We don’t.”
“Goddamnit, he’s going to notice that parts of Detroit are missing. That a battalion of the 82nd Airborne just went airborne.”
“We’ll get meteorologists to come up with something. Climate change. Freak whirlwind—something. For chrissakes, Detroit’s right on the Great Lakes.”
“Or close enough to them at least.”
She shook her head. “You’re expecting people to believe that seventy-ton main battle tanks and armored vehicles fell up into the sky because of a freak storm?”
There was silence for a few moments.
“Obviously, we’ll need to work on the cover story, but you get the idea.”
She sighed. “The BTC murdered Bill McAllen. They disintegrated him. Do we just let them do whatever they want and get away with it? How long before they come for us, too?”
The deputy director of the CIA put his hand on her shoulder. “They won, Kaye. Let it go. Let’s try to manage the aftermath. Bide our time.”
Monahan felt numb for the next half hour as the generals and intelligence chiefs tried to divide their PR problem into solvable pieces, but it all sounded like nonsense to her—like something the public would never believe. But then again, she had seen the truth and she didn’t believe that either. Monahan kept thinking that there must be some way she hadn’t yet thought of to react. Some strategy by which she could best the BTC.
But then there was a distant booming sound—and impossibly, water glasses on the table rippled, even though they were deep underground.
The generals and intelligence directors leapt up, looking up at the ceiling.
“What the hell is that?”<
br />
“Hedrick is coming for us. Jesus. If they can control gravity . . . they could rip us straight out of the ground!”
Monahan looked around the table at them. Panicked. They were all panicked.
One general shouted, “Continuity of government bunkers are no longer safe! We need to get out of here and spread out—go to separate locations. Or the heads of critical agencies are going to be wiped out all at once.”
Monahan followed them as if she were watching from a distance. Still in a daze. They put her on an electric cart with a couple of generals and a heavily armed security detail—all of the guards inexplicably wearing MOPP biological protection gear. She figured somebody must have grabbed the wrong binder. Or perhaps they didn’t have a binder for the scenario where Site R and all its high-value occupants fell into the sky.
As the cart came out of the huge gates at the bunker entrance, it skidded to a stop, and Monahan’s stupor served her well. She didn’t immediately lose her mind. Generals staggered around holding their heads in their hands, but she walked calmly, staring out at the shattered remains of main battle tanks and armored vehicles that had crashed into the forested slopes around them, leaving huge craters and fires behind, along with the body parts of hundreds of men, their corpses flash-frozen and then shattered like glass.
And she realized that the entire battalion had been thrown at them from the heavens by technological gods. Gods whom they’d angered.
CHAPTER 26
Action Plan
Jon Grady awoke in a comfortable, modernist bedroom with a high-raftered ceiling with walls that didn’t rise high enough to meet it. As a result he could hear a distant television elsewhere in the loft. The sound of clattering pots and dishes.
Grady turned to see Alexa asleep, sitting in a chair across the bedroom, positron gun in her lap. He guessed she must have come in sometime during the night. Standing guard perhaps? He turned on his side and watched her sleeping, studying her face. The goddess Aphrodite had nothing on her.
With her eyes still shut Alexa said, “You’re freaking me out, Jon.”
He quickly looked away, coughing. “What was that?”
Alexa opened her eyes.
“You’re obviously still on guard.”
She sat up. “I don’t sleep much. Never have. I heard your door open in the middle of the night and checked up on you. Found the door open—you asleep. I’m not sure I entirely trust Cotton. You realize he could turn us in to save his own skin?”
Grady narrowed his eyes and then felt for the video device hung around his neck.
It was gone. He tore off the covers and searched the sheets.
“What’s wrong? What are you looking for?”
He leaned down to look alongside and then under the bed. Leaping out of it, he heaved and overturned the bed entirely. In a moment he came up with the silver chain on which he had hung the video device—a neat cut severing the loop, the clasp still in place. “Cotton . . .” He bolted out of bed, still wearing all of his clothes, and raced through the bedroom door.
Alexa was right behind him. “What’s wrong?”
“The video record from Hibernity is gone. It has everything!” He looked both ways in the hallway and realized the sounds he was hearing were coming from the large workshop, not the kitchen, and so he ran toward it.
She followed close behind.
Grady moved down the corridor. Glancing for any open doors but finding none, he walked all the way to the end, where the corridor opened to a truly enormous technical workshop. There were robotic arms by the dozen on tables and on shelves—in fact, whole domestic robots, and shelf after shelf of inscrutable high-tech components. Not a circuit board in sight—just solid, shimmering, optically strange metamaterials and coils of electropolymer muscle. The place was possibly a third of the entire floor—a good three thousand square feet.
Ahead Grady saw Richard Cotton sitting at a workbench, viewing some type of cellular culture through an electron microscope display. Nearby robotic arms performed precision movements over petri dishes.
“Cotton!”
The man turned and lifted up a crystal visor he wore on a strap around his head. “Whoa. What’s with all the shouting?”
Grady stomped up to him. “Where the hell is it?”
Cotton looked quizzically to Alexa. Then back to Grady. “Where is what?”
“My video device. The one that was around my neck.”
Cotton raised one eyebrow. “I don’t appreciate the tone.”
Grady grabbed him by his shirt and dragged him off his chair, toppling it. “I’m not fucking around! Tell me where it is! I know you have it.”
Cotton tried to protect the work on the table. “Damnit! Don’t disturb those cultures. You’re going to mess everything up.”
Alexa gazed at nearby workbenches and pointed to something held in place by a robotic clamp. “Is this it?”
Grady turned and felt relief upon seeing it—but then twice as much anger. He released Cotton, dropping him onto the floor, and moved to grab Chattopadhyay’s video device from the clamp. It was held fast.
“What the hell are you doing with it?”
Cotton got to his feet. “Well, if you must know, I could tell you weren’t going to part with it without a hassle, and it sounded like it might be useful in damaging the BTC.”
“Release it. I want it now!”
“All right, relax.” Cotton stepped up and tapped a button on a holographic display. The clamp released. “Don’t touch anything else.”
Grady grabbed the device before it could fall. He pressed the “play” button and was relieved to see Chattopadhyay’s video appear.
Cotton nodded at it. “I was able to copy all the data on it. The video. The DNA. The gyroscope-decoding instructions. Just one problem: There’s no gyroscope data to decode.”
Grady was making another necklace from polymer thread he’d found nearby and looping the video device onto it. “What do you mean there’s no gyroscope data?”
“I mean there isn’t any gyroscope data. It’s a separate chip. Maybe it got fried by the electromagnetic pulse, maybe when you came in contact with Morrison while his power suit was shooting sparks—I don’t know. But the gyroscope is fried.”
Grady glared at him. “What the hell did you do to it? And why did you sneak in during the night and cut this off my neck? You cut it off my neck!”
“Time was a factor. If the BTC burst in in the middle of the night—before you’d gotten up the courage to trust me with it—we might have lost it entirely. And it might prove useful as a bargaining chip to keep us all alive—maybe threaten to release the data if they don’t back off.”
“You asshole. You broke it.”
“I didn’t break anything. It’s an impressive little piece of homemade nanotech, though, I must say. One of your prisoner friends really knows his business, that’s a fact. It’s biological—looks like they used blood plasma for the DNA encoding. Grown bone culture for the housing. I wouldn’t want to have to guard those fuckers.”
Grady gripped his temples, distraught. “That data was the only way for me to find my way back to Hibernity—to bring back help.”
Cotton gave him a look. “Don’t be crazy. The BTC knows where Hibernity is.” He turned to Alexa. “You probably know, don’t you?”
She pondered the question. “I don’t, unfortunately. Hedrick has a tight hold on that information. The AIs bring pilots to and from Hibernity with blast shields down, so even they don’t know.” She turned to Grady. “But Cotton’s right, it’s got to be somewhere on the BTC network, and if one of Cotton’s BTC turncoats can get it for us, you should be back in business.”
Grady exhaled and hung the device around his neck again. He cast a dark look Cotton’s way as he left the workshop. “Cotton, if you take anything of mine again without my permission,
you will regret it.”
Cotton called after him. “Grumpy before breakfast, I see. Shall I cook up something?”
• • •
Grady returned to his bedroom and shut the door. He sat on the floor in the darkest corner and reactivated the video device—fast-forwarding from one prisoner testimonial to another, making sure they were all there.
“. . . discovered the relationship between protein fifty-three and malignant neoplasm . . .”
Grady clicked to another.
“I am Petra Klapner. I was imprisoned in 1993 . . .”
There was a sharp knock on the door. Grady ignored it, but then Alexa poked her head in. “You okay?”
Grady nodded as he clicked to the next video.
“I am Anton Bezizlik. In 1998 I was taken by the BTC . . .”
Alexa entered and closed the door behind her. She studied the holographic person floating before them. “These are the prisoners.”
Grady nodded.
She stood watching. “I remember that man. I lectured him about his selfishness.”
“. . . please tell my family that I am still alive. It has been so many years.”
Alexa caught herself, feeling the enormity of what she’d done.
Grady spoke without looking at her. “You have to understand. I cannot fail these people. I cannot.”
The middle-aged Russian man on-screen rocked back and forth. “. . . my daughter . . .” The man’s face streamed with tears as he struggled to speak. “She will have lived her life, never knowing me. I think of all that I have lost.”
Alexa felt as though the hologram was speaking directly to her—overwhelming her with guilt.
Grady gestured to it. “These are some of the greatest minds that ever lived. There are da Vincis and Galileos in that prison. They could do so much, and instead, they’ve been brutalized.” Grady turned to see Alexa’s distraught face as she watched the man on-screen.
She spoke matter-of-factly. “We need to rescue them.”
“What?”
“We need to rescue them. But we need to do something else first—bring down the BTC.”