Catch the Lightning (18 page)

Althor threw Daniel to the side. The dogs hit Althor full force and they fell to the ground, the dogs tearing at his suit, trying for his neck as he wrestled with them. Moving in a blur, he heaved them off his body. They hit the asphalt hard, and the black one lay there, eyes closed, breathing raggedly. The red dog lifted its head and tried to climb to its feet.

As Althor jumped up, Daniel backed away, toward the scaffolding. He didn’t get far; Althor grabbed his arm and swung him around to face the milcops. He slapped his knife flat against Daniel’s neck.

The knife’s brilliance shattered the sunlight. The red dog growled, on its feet again, but a command from a milcop stayed it. Daniel stood stiff as a board, sweat running down his face. Grabbing my arm with his free hand, Althor backed toward the hangar, pulling us both with him.

We ran straight into the concrete dividers that held up the scaffolding. Although the Jag was only a few yards away, it might as well have been across the base. The canvas swung open on the side farthest from us and a group of people in white coveraEs appeared with another milcop. Rather than take them to the man-gate’on this side, near us, he puEed the chain-link fence away from the far side of the hangar and took them out that way.

The milcops in front of us squinted in the glare from Althor’s knife. A man with hair cut so close to his head that it looked like yeEow dust spoke. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

“Move away from the ship,” Althor said. “Or I kill him.”

“We don’t want anyone hurt.” The milcop had a soothing voice. But something bothered me. Had his attention flicked to a point behind Althor?

I glanced back and saw a man with an M-16 coming through the scaffolding. He gave me a reassuring nod, apparently assuming I was a hostage. In truth, he was right, though at the time I didn’t see it that way. I turned around, trying to look as if I were going along with him. But I spoke to Althor under my breath. “A man is coming up behind us. He’s two steps—”

Althor whirled and kicked up his leg, thudding his heel into the man’s chest with an accuracy that suggested he already knew the milcop was there. The guard crumpled and Althor lunged over the dividers, still holding Daniel and me, forcing us to scramble with him. As Heather and Joshua threw themselves over the barrier, something whizzed so close to my head that it brushed my hafr. We fell on our stomachs next to the unconscious milcop. Bullets hit the dividers, sending concrete chips flying into the air, and the barrier split into a network of cracks. “Stop shooting,” someone shouted. “You’ll hit the ship!” Althor grabbed the fallqji guard’s M-16, studied it for a second, and fired over the dividers, spraying the area with bullets. The milcops scattered, most running for the hangar’s cover. They released three more dogs, and as we crawled behind the dividers the beasts bounded toward us, growling, fangs showing. Althor fired and one dog dropped, then another, then the last. I bit my lip, trying not to cry out as the animals died.

Clenching the M-16 in one hand, Althor played his fingers over the transcom in his body, its display lighting up his side. A shriek burst out of it, one that continually changed pitch and quality, going too high to hear, dropping into audible range, then down so low that I felt rather than heard it, then back into hearing range. I later learned it was working in conjunction with components and convoluted waveguides within his body. The scaffolding around us began to shake. Beams creaked like racehorses straining at the starting gate, and with a groaning snap, one of the supports broke free, flying away from the structure.

The scaffolding buckled. We lunged to our feet, running for the Jag whEe metal and wood fell around us. I didn’t understand Althor’s purpose; the coEapsing structure was more danger to us than to anyone else. People were shouting, someone saying he couldn’t get off a clear shot. Someone else ordered him not to shoot, that the buEet might rebound into the hangar. I realized then that the chaos was helping more than hurting us.

An edge of something hit my head and I stumbled, the world going dark.

“No!”
Althor grabbed me around the waist, half carrying me as he ran. A milcop appeared in front of us. My dazed brain saw his movements like a high-speed parade of snapshots: he raised his M-16; Althor’s boot hit his arm; the gun barked; shots went wEd over Althor’s head; the milcop collapsed as Althor barreled into him. The canvas on the hangar loomed in front of us—

And we stopped.

Four milcops stood there, their backs to the canvas, only a few yards away their M-16s trained on Althor. He stared at them, his inner lids glinting in the sunlight. He still had his gun, but if he tried to aim and fire it, we all knew the milcops would shoot. He might get off one round, but not before they fired. And they were too close to miss.

The man with dust-blond hair spoke to Althor. “Drop your weapons.”

Althor touched the transcom in his waist, sEencing it. His face was impassive, but I felt his frustration like steel bands. I picked up something else, too, an emotion less easy to define. Fear? Some, yes, but this was different. Longing. To stand this close to the Jag and be unable to reach it was physically painful to him.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” the dust-blond man said. His awe felt like velvet on my skin. He would shoot Althor if necessary, but he didn’t want to. None of the guards was supposed to know what Althor was, but they had guessed. This one wanted to talk to him, ask a hundred questions, not as an interrogation, but to speak to our first visitor from beyond Earth. He wanted to ' understand why Althor looked human, why he was here, how his ship worked. He wanted Althor to help us fly to the stars.

Actually, two of the milcops felt that way. The third was just doing his job. The fourth, a man with a clenched face, made me uneasy. He saw Althor as a threat beyond imagining. Had he and Althor been alone, he would have shot Althor point-blank with no qualms at all, certain he was protecting Earth. Fear made his thoughts vivid: he disagreed with the decision to place no explosives on Althor’s ship—better to risk losing the Mojave Desert than the entire planet.

Voices came from behind us. Glancing back, I saw a line of milcops several yards away. One, a woman, was speaking into a walkie-talkie, making a report. Dispirited, I turned back. The dust-blond man was still talking in his soothing voice: drop your weapon, release your hostages, come with us. As Althor let the M-16 slide out of his hand, I closed my eyes. It was over. Done. We were caught.

“Whoa, shit,” a voice yelled. “It’s alive!”

I snapped opened my eyes. Everyone was staring at the hangar entrance. The wind had lifted the canvas again, kept lifting it, in fact, higher than seemed reasonable given the weights holding it down. Then I realized it wasn’t wind pushing that canvas up.

Althor couldn’t go to the Jag, so it was coming to him.

It rolled out fast, straight at us. The milcops scattered, running to keep from being crushed. As soon as the man with the clenched face was clear, he spun around and fired his M-16 at the ship.

“Don’t shoot it!” someone shouted.

Althor ran for his ship, dragging Daniel and me with him, so close to the Jag that my hand rubbed it. The hull had a pebbly texture, like a golf ball. A hatch sucked-open and Althor lifted me off the; ground, literally throwing me inside. I slid across a deck of glowing blue tiles and plowed into a pile of computer printouts. Althor shoved Daniel after me, then jumped inside while Daniel rolled out of the way. Heather and Joshua scrambled in just before the hatch sucked closed like the shutter on a high-speed camera.

As I jumped to my feet, an explosion rocked the ship and flung us across the cabin. Althor’s injured shoulder smashed against a bulkhead and I felt agony sear through him, so intense he almost blacked out. But he didn’t falter. He pushed into the cockpit, squeezing between the bulkhead and pilot’s seat. Papers, pens, and calculators lay strewn over the console in front of him. He sent them flying with a sweep of his hand and shoved himself into the seat. It snapped an exoskeleton around his body in a form-fitting mesh, bringing an array of panels to his fingertips.

Then it touched his mind.

Althor gasped. At least, that was the audible sound. In his mind, he screamed. His link with the Jag shattered. I only picked up a ghost of his pain, but even that almost sent me into shock.

Another explosion hit the ship, a dull boom against the hull. The force of it threw me into Daniel and we fell-with an impact that sent my breath out in a gasp. Scrambling back to our feet, we grabbed handholds in the bulkhead, hanging on with Heather and Joshua.

Althor quit trying to reach the Jag through his web and spoke in his own language. A screen in front of him glittered blue, swirling with lines and speckles. Then a three-dimensional image of the scene outside appeared.

Some of the milcops had backed away from the ship, staring at it with a mixture of fear and wonder. Several were struggling with the clenched-face man, trying to wrest away his gun. He flipped one over his back and knocked out another, tearing away from them long enough to throw something at the Jag. As another blast shook the ship, I saw the dust-blond milcop fire his M-16—not at the Jag, but at the man with the clenched face. The man went down, clamping one hand around his knee.

Althor was still speaking to the Jag, low and fast: The ship hovered at the edges of his mind, extending probes here, there, making brief connections, withdrawing if Althor flinched, strengthening the link if he didn’t.

A rainbow appeared in the holo of the scene outside, superimposed over it. As the colors swept across the milcops, they clapped their hands to their ears. From my link to the Jag, I picked up what happened: the ship was using membranes in its hull to make sound waves painful to human ears. The rainbow was an image the Jag produced in the holo of the scene outside to show the waves: red for maximum density, purple for minimum.

The milcops backed away taking the two injured men with them. Several were already out of the enclosure and sprinting for an office building, one shouting into a walkie-talkie. They had no way of knowing what the Jag was about to do. Attack? Explode?

When the rainbow reached the fence, it turned muddy. That blurring quickly spread back into the enclosure, making the colors run together and fade. I caught a message from the Jag it was missing something—an instruction set—equations for deeling with certain boundary conditions. Its corrupted system was misreading the interference created by the fence as an instruction to turn off the sound.

Nor could Althor get the Jag to move. It had stopped about halfway out of the hangar. He asked for a grid of some kind, but whatever routines the Jag needed to process that command weren’t functioning. Finally he touched a disk on his exoskeleton, entering commands manually. The grid appeared, a three-dimensional lattice superimposed on the scene outside. A blazing red dot swept through the image, oudining the hangar walls—

With no warning, the hangar exploded. Debris flew everywhere, hurtling through the air. The remaining milcops inside the enclosure took off, scrambling over the nearest section of fence. Some dropped to the ground, protecting their heads with their arms while debris flew above them. A block the size of a door came at the Jag. In the holomap, it looked like it was shooting straight at Althor. When it crashed against the outside hull, it appeared to shatter only inches away from his face.

Then the hangar was gone. The Jag stood free under open sky.

A loud rumbling started, vibrating the deck. Outside, the last of the milcops jumped to their feet-and ran like wind in a hurricane. One man tripped over a chunk of debris and another hauled him up, dragging him until he could run again. The Jag’s rumbling built, growing stronger and louder.

Althor swiveled his seat around and regarded the four of us. “Some of the launching routines are—I don’t know the word. What you call ‘off-line,’ I think.”

“Can you fix them?” Heather asked.

“They fix themselves. It will take a few seconds.” He turned to me. “I need hostages. But not four. If you—” He stopped. “If you want to go, you must leave now.”

This was it. He might escape or he might die, but either way he was leaving. Words stuck in my throat. I couldn’t say what he wanted to hear. I couldn’t go with him.

When I didn’t react, Althor’s face became an emotionless mask. Swiveling his seat around, he turned back to his controls.

The airlock sucked open.

“Hurry,” Althor said. The rumbling from the Jag’s engine became more insistent. “I must leave.”

I went to the airlock. I was making the choice Jake had offered, at Caltech, taking safety and the known against my fear of the unknown. I thought I could live with it: Jake was also an em-path, a Kyle operator, not as strong as Althor, but still an empath.

But I couldn’t forget Althor’s words: It’s like starving inside. Being with Jake was just enough sustenance to stay alive.

I turned around. “Wait.”

Althor remained intent on his controls. He had turned into a machine again, whether on purpose or because he had no control over it, I didn’t know. His voice was flat. “I have"no time to wait.”

“Take me too,” I said.

The airlock closed. “You will come with me?” he asked.

“You have to promise.” I swallowed. “Promise you won’t strand me in some universe I don’t know, where I can’t understand anything.”

He swiveled his seat to face me. “I will promise this, if you promise to be my wife.”

I couldn’t understand why he wanted it, given how little we knew each other, but there it was. “I promise.”

“Swear that you will connect to no other network,” Althor said. “Local or remote.”

“I don’t underst—” *

“Swear. Or I will not take you.”

“But you were the one who asked—”

He regarded.me with shielded eyes. “I was too closely integrated with my emotional functions then. In this mode, I have higher clarity of thought.”

He was lying. I knew it then and I know it now. I saw the orange flicker around his body. But he was in control now and he meant to get what he wanted.