Area 51: The Truth (25 page)

Then Turcotte activated his jets, moving out of the cargo bay. But he didn’t head across to the space station. Instead, he moved up, right next to the surface of the mothership, following it around to the side away from the space station.

The other eleven men held back as the first man to reach the space station moved to the left of the airlock. He placed a shaped charge against the side of the module, and then backed off.

The charge blew, peeling back the side of the module. A pair of commandos jetted in through the hole, weapons at the ready.

Turcotte watched as the Talon came in fast from directly behind the mothership. It had been hiding to the north, behind the curvature of the Earth. As it closed on the mothership, the lean form rotated, so that the thicker stem was forward. The slightly curved ship decelerated abruptly, so that when it reached the mothership, it was barely moving. The Talon angled against the end of the mothership perfectly but didn’t make contact, holding just a few feet away.

Turcotte was in the shadows near the top of the mothership, a shadowy figure that was almost invisible against the black skin of the craft. He saw a flash of light that lasted for a few seconds. On night-vision mode he could see a space-suited individual leave the Talon and move forward toward the mothership.

Turcotte raised the MK-98 and sighted it at the figure. He waited until it was abreast of him, farther down the ship. Then he fired as quickly as the gun would cycle through the magazine, emptying half of it.

The first depleted uranium dart hit Aspasia’s Shadow in the right side, punching through his space suit, through his body, and out the other side. The impact sent his body spinning. The second round missed because of that, but Turcotte was adjusting and the next three all hit, torso shots, tearing apart flesh and bone. Small puffs of red surrounded the body.

Turcotte ceased firing with six rounds still in the chamber. He jetted “down” toward the tumbling body. He had to accelerate to catch up to it as the rounds had not only torn through the body, but also given it velocity. Reaching out with his articulated hand, Turcotte grabbed hold of the lifeless figure.

He was now almost a kilometer from the mothership, so he held on to the body as he arrested his vector.

Holding still in space, high over Earth, Turcotte used the hand to rip into the pack on Aspasia’s Shadow’s back. He located oxygen lines and pulled them out, keeping a grip on the lines, while turning the body around.

Turcotte brought the figure in close in front of him. He lifted the dark visor and saw Aspasia’s Shadow’s face. A thick trail of blood leaked from the mouth. The eyes were vacant. Turcotte waited. The eyelids flickered, intelligence showed briefly in the face.

Turcotte closed his “hand,” ripping through the oxygen lines. Aspasia’s Shadow’s mouth opened, gasped for air for several seconds. Then death came once more.

Turcotte considered lashing Aspasia’s Shadow to the outside of the mothership just like this. Having him die every few minutes. It seemed a fitting retribution for all the sorrow the creature had inflicted on mankind.

Turcotte looked toward the planet. The demarcation line between day and night was halfway across the United States. He could see a swirl of clouds in the Caribbean, a storm brewing.

Yakov’s voice startled him out of his reverie. “My friend? Are you all right?” “Yeah, I’m fine.” “Where are you? I’ve had a message relayed from the men on station outside the station. Captain Manning has taken the shuttle back. His men have seized the computer and are working on stopping the launches.”

Turcotte had forgotten about the target matrix. He realized he’d forgotten about it because he’d adjusted his thinking to outsmart Aspasia’s Shadow—he knew the creature would not be concerned with the matrix either. It had simply been a ploy to lure Turcotte and the mothership here. That’s not to say that the launch wouldn’t have happened, but rather that Aspasia’s Shadow only considered the destruction of all those cities a sideshow to his primary objective, which had been to get the mothership.

He was thinking like his enemy. It was advantageous in battle, Turcotte allowed, as he shifted his view once more to the body he held, noticing the face come to life once more, struggle for air, then die, but it made him feel as if he had a hole drilled clear through his chest. To think like his enemy he had to put aside his humanity.

A thump on the side of his helmet made Turcotte start, then he realized it was his own hand, unconsciously moving up to touch the spot over the implant. That brought him back to the current situation. Aspasia’s Shadow. Immortal.

But.

The word echoed in Turcotte’s mind. Checks and balances. He doubted very much that the Airlia had designed the Grail to give immortality to humans without having a way of taking back the gift. In his mind he replayed the scene when he had first met Aspasia’s Shadow in the mothership, inside Ararat—the first time he’d met the creature after it had partaken of the Grail. Only one thing had seemed to disconcert Aspasia’s Shadow.

Turcotte drew the sword from his side and grasped it gingerly with his mechanical hand. He drew the arm back, the stars glistening off the blade.

Aspasia’s Shadow’s eyes came alive with intelligence. His mouth opened, struggling for air, the pain etched across his features. He focused on the sword above Turcotte’s head, and his eyes widened in fear.

Turcotte swung, and the sword sliced through Aspasia’s Shadow’s neck, parting head from body in one smooth stroke.

Blood flowed out of the neck for a moment, then stopped. Turcotte waited to see if there would be any change. After a minute nothing. Aspasia’s Shadow was finally dead.

Space

Turcotte turned toward the mothership. “Yakov?” “Yes?” “How are they doing on stopping the launches?”

“I haven’t heard from them since the initial transmission,” Yakov said. “FM radio won’t reach through the side of the station.”

“Damn.it,” Turcotte cursed.

With one last glance at Aspasia’s Shadow’s severed head and torso, Turcotte jetted around the mothership toward the space station. He spotted two suited men flanking the tear that had been blown in the side of the station. Turcotte passed between them.

Lights were flickering as the station’s power struggled to continue running. There was no one in the module. Turcotte twisted and went headfirst into the connecting corridor. He bumped into one of the commandos as he entered the next module.

He was assaulted by a blast of FM communications. It sounded like everyone was trying to speak at once, the radio waves contained inside the module. Six men in
TASC
suits were crowded inside along with four dead Guides. They were all gathered around one of their own, who was seated at a laptop computer, trying to type with great difficulty, given the limitations of the oversize hand he was using.

“Shut up!” Turcotte yelled.

The airwaves fell silent. “Status?”

“I can’t get the codes entered,” Manning said. Turcotte saw the name tag on the man at the computer and realized it was Manning.

Turcotte checked the chronometer display inside his helmet. Less than three minutes until the matrix was fired. He’d counted on Manning and his men to take care of this. He wouldn’t have floated above the planet contemplating Aspasia’s Shadow’s fate if he’d known there was a problem.

“Why not?”

Manning held up his artificial hand, now with a screwdriver grasped between two large fingers. “Too big.”

“Why didn’t you bring it back to the mothership?”

Manning was still trying to type in codes using the screwdriver. “By the time we took it off-line from the station’s SATCom system, transported it over, hooked it back up and got it on-line…” Manning didn’t finish the statement as he continued to peck at the keyboard. “I’ve got five of the targets off the matrix.”

Turcotte found it so amazing he almost started laughing. After all he’d been through, to have the planet devastated by a nuclear strike from his own country—and to fail to stop it because they simply couldn’t type in the proper code to stop it in time.

He did a time check. Two minutes.

Turcotte turned toward the side of the module closest to the mothership. He raised the MK-98 and fired his remaining six rounds, tearing a gap in the wall so he could communicate on the local FM band—line of sight.

“Quinn.” “Sir?”

“If we can’t get all the stop codes entered in time—options?” There was silence.

“Seven,” Manning announced.

Eighteen to go, Turcotte thought. No way will Manning will make it. “Quinn?”

“Ten,” Manning was poking with the screwdriver. Turcotte wondered which cities had been saved and which were still doomed as he waited for a response. “Send a new matrix,” Quinn said. “What?” Turcotte asked.

“It’s the quickest way. One new entry instead of deleting all the old entries.”

Turcotte reached forward and tapped the commando’s commander on the shoulder. “Manning, you get that?”

“I got it, but how do I do it? And the nukes will still go off somewhere.”

“Not if you reset to target their own launch sites,” Quinn said. “The data is already there—it has to be in order for a matrix to work. Just turn it against itself.”

Quinn rattled off a series of numbers and Manning pecked at the keyboard. Turcotte floated in the background, feeling quite useless. He checked the time. Under a minute. The seconds clicked off.

Quinn fell silent. Ten seconds. “Quinn?” Turcotte asked.

“It’s done.”

Turcotte grabbed hold and moved himself to the opening he had created. He pushed out of the hatch and looked down at the planet. He could imagine the turmoil on board submarines, inside bombers and launch control centers as crews realized they would be destroying themselves if they launched their weapons. He watched the United States, now almost all in daylight, waiting for the telltale burst of a nuclear weapon exploding as there would be no transit time. Nothing.

Tripler Army Medical Center, Oahu, Hawaii

It was early morning, a few hours before the sun would come up. Terry Cummings carefully unhooked the various monitoring devices from Kelly Reynolds. Cummings knew that other than the intravenous drip providing nourishment, none of the gear made any difference. The doctors had done all they could and the consensus was that it was a miracle Reynolds was alive and no one had any faith that she would ever recover.

Cummings rolled the bed into the quiet hallway to the elevator. Once on board, she pressed the button for the roof. When the doors slid open, she pushed the bed onto the roof of the center tower of Tripler. Since the hospital was already high up on top of Moanalua Ridge, she had a commanding view of the south side of the island of Oahu. An offshore breeze gently blew across the rooftop. Cummings turned the crank on the side of Reynolds’s bed, raising her frail upper body so that she was half-sitting. The lights of Honolulu were off to the left. The island was still in the throes of recovering from the nanovirus assault but life was slowly getting back to normal. Cummings looked down at Reynolds. Her eyes were closed, the skin taut against her cheekbones.

Cummings leaned over, her mouth near Reynolds’s ear. “Feel the breeze?” She reached down and took the clawlike hands in her own, rubbing the leathery skin. “Do you feel my hands on yours?”

Cummings moved from the hands up the arms, working Reynolds’s entire body, slowly and with great diligence so that when the sun began to rise, she had just finished. Throughout she had spoken to Reynolds, keeping up the conversation as if the other woman were replying. Cummings stretched, then cranked the top half of the bed back down. Focused on pushing it back toward the elevator, she failed to notice a muscle on the side of Reynolds’s face twitch as if the woman were trying to speak. The muscle moved for several moments, then subsided.

Camp Rowe, North Carolina

Turcotte was actually looking forward to the journey to Mars. It would be an opportunity to rest and recuperate. As far as what would happen when they got to the Red Planet, he blocked thinking about that right now, shutting down his thought projection as effectively as if a steel door had come down through his mind. He was so tired he knew that any plan he came up with at the moment would likely have serious flaws in it.

They were touching down at Camp Rowe, returning from defeating Aspasia’s Shadow—for the last time—a phrase that Turcotte savored. A creature that had led the Mission for generations and haunted the history of mankind had finally been vanquished. It was a victory, a clear-cut one. Yakov was by Turcotte’s side as they went down the main corridor of the mothership.

“One down, two to go,” Yakov said. “Excuse me?”

“The Swarm and Artad,” Yakov said.

Exactly what Turcotte didn’t want to contemplate at the moment. The cargo door slowly slid open and Turcotte paused. There was someone standing by the ramp leading into the mothership, silhouetted by the lights ringing the airfield. A tall woman clutching an old leather briefcase to her chest with an overnight bag at her feet. She had wide shoulders and shoulder-length gray hair.

She extended one hand as Turcotte approached. “Major Turcotte, I’m Professor Leahy.”

“Can you duplicate what Tesla did?” Turcotte asked.

She didn’t answer. She kept her hand extended, until Turcotte shook it. “Yes.”

Turcotte blinked, surprised at her confidence. “You only just saw his lost papers, how—” “Do you want me to make his weapon?” Leahy asked.

Turcotte nodded. Yakov came up behind him.

“Then why are you questioning my answer?” she asked.

Turcotte smiled. “You’ll do well with this gang. Welcome aboard.” He introduced her to Yakov. The Russian picked up her overnight bag and indicated for her to follow him on board. She pointed where several forklifts were lined up, holding pallets.

“I gave Major Quinn a list of what I’ll need. Pretty basic stuff, actually. It wasn’t hard to find. And most of what I brought is material I already had. I’ve been working on Tesla’s coil for over thirty years.”