Alien Hunter: Underworld (29 page)

As soon as Flynn rose from the chair, the distance down to the ring became short again.

“You go first, Flynn. Don't want to get you lost.”

When Flynn looked down again, he could now see the opening they had come through, and below it the concrete floor not four feet underneath.

“Careful, now—everyone who's disappeared in here has been on their way out.”

Flynn went to the edge of the opening and dropped his feet out.

“Reach back, please take my hand.”

Flynn felt Dawkins's thin hand in his own. He dropped down, the scientist coming immediately behind him.

Dawkins stood with his head bowed, his face sheened with sweat. “That's hard,” he said.

“I'm glad you made it out,” Evans said.

Flynn fought back any sign of the bitter disappointment he was feeling. The truth was, though, that this entire journey had been a waste of effort, and from the way these people were acting, dangerous on a whole lot of different levels.

It was time to cut and run. Except for one problem. “Where's Mac?”

“He and Evans went up to the commissary a couple of hours ago, to eat and get you checked in to visitor quarters.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dawkins laughed a little. “That's another reality in there, with a different time. I once worked in there for a day, trying to find some kind of connection between the control panels and the motor. When I came down, four weeks had passed, and two men had disappeared while searching for me.” He bowed his head and was silent for a moment. Then he said in a voice choked with pain. “One of them was my brother. We're twins.” Then, lower, full of more trembling emotion, “We know he died. He's one of the ones we could smell.”

The thought came to Flynn that they were like bugs trapped behind the mystery of a glass window, a mystery they could never hope to defeat and never hope to understand. Impossible not because they didn't have the information, but because they didn't have the raw brain capacity. Nothing could tell a fly what glass was. Nothing could tell a human being what this disk was.

“Are we finished, then?”

“Sure, Flynn. If you're done. Any more questions?”

“No more. Not now.” But there was one. He'd save it for later, though, at just the right moment, or maybe by then there would be no point, and he would never ask it at all.

He had not gotten very far here. Not far at all. In fact, all his visit had done was confirm his worst fear, which was that the disks were so far beyond human understanding that there was no hope. If so, then Morris would soon rule this world of Earth. It would be free no more, a slave planet given over to whatever its master chose to do with it.

Fifty years after Cortés conquered Mexico, only one out of ten of the indigenous people were left alive. If Flynn's battle failed, he knew that humanity would fare even worse. Our species would be lost to the egomaniacal lusts of a psychopath.

He was a humble man. He'd never thought of himself as being particularly important, but in this moment, mankind's future was clearly his to win or lose. And not more than a couple of hundred people on the whole planet, if that, even knew his name.

Was he up to this?

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

FLYNN SWALLOWED
the acid of desperation back into his churning guts. He did not see how he could win this thing, not against technology so advanced that it seemed more like magic than like science. Was Morris's disk equally advanced, a machine that might as well be a living thing? How could anybody ever damage a craft like that with a little chunk of lead, even if they did hit a seam?

On the way back to the main building, Flynn noticed that Mac was now quiet and withdrawn.

“Geri said we're dealing with an old, primitive device—remember that.”

“The seam just disappeared. Then a door opens like some kind of magic is going on. I don't know, man—no matter how primitive it is, maybe it's not primitive enough for a jerk with a gun.”

When they returned to the main building and went inside, Flynn had an incredibly powerful sense of déjà vu. This hallway—wide with a black linoleum floor polished to a high gloss, its rows of office doors, each one locked like a safe—was as familiar to him as his own house in Menard. And yet, his mind was telling him he had never been here before.

As they approached the commissary, the smell of the food was incredibly familiar, sending a dagger of memory right through him. Not that it was good food—it was hardly that—it was just damn familiar.

He was certain now that he'd been subjected to hypnosis so that he wouldn't think about this place. It was a security measure. Too bad it hadn't helped Dr. Miller.

Frankly, he was excited about taking Mac to Bio. His friend had found a seam that was almost microscopic. As he was, the man had what was called exquisite vision. When they were kids, he'd been able to pick out the moons of Jupiter, not to mention see a tree rat crossing a wire at night and blow it to kingdom come at a distance of a couple of hundred yards. And leave the wire untouched.

“This is not food,” Mac said. They were passing down the steam table in the commissary.

“I believe those are chicken wings,” Evans said.

“From what planet?”

Flynn remembered what he'd eaten the last time he was here. In the hope that reenactment would release more memory, he got the same meal again, a quarter chicken, green beans, baked potato, and pineapple yogurt for dessert. He, Caruthers, Evans, and Mac sat together. The others had gone to a table of their own.

“I enjoyed my time here,” he said. “When I was working with Dr. Miller.” Mac gave him a sharp look, but the other two didn't react. It wasn't a good sign, but he continued anyway. “I thought maybe we could go down to the Biology section and have a look around.”

Both Caruthers and Evans stopped eating.

“I mean, I was there. That's where my physical enhancement was done. I'd like to look the place over again.”

Laughing, Evans said, “I think I need to consult Legal.”

The cavalier reply made him so mad, it was all he could do not to reach across the table and splatter the guy's face against the far wall.

He put his anger firmly in a drawer and smiled. “Well,” he said affably, “that's probably the best thing. On the other hand, I have a cop out there in Texas who could at any time get picked up and have his eyes cut out of his head, not to mention what will happen to his family. But you consult Legal. However, know this, all of you: If they die, I am liable to become very damn irrational, and that's not going to be comfortable for you.”

He reached over and tapped Evans on the ear, moving so fast that the gesture couldn't be seen by normal eyes.

Evans shot out of his chair and sprawled on the floor, holding his head and crying out.

The buzz of conversation in the room died away.

As Evans sputtered and gagged and struggled to his feet, Flynn stood up. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, is anybody here from the Biology unit?”

Nobody reacted. Here and there, people began leaving the room.

“I was there. Some of you probably worked with me.”

The trickle of people leaving became a flood.

“You did good,” he said. “I'm quite a piece of work, folks. Fastest gun in the West.” He drew the Bull and reholstered it. “Anybody see that? No?”

The flood surged toward the doors.

“Okay, folks, don't have a heart attack—I'm harmless. At the moment.”

The only table still populated was theirs. A couple of security guards, one of them with a stun gun, stood in the doorway. Flynn returned to his seat. “I'd advise you to tell those guys not to make any sudden moves,” he said to Evans and Caruthers. “I don't care for sudden moves. Frankly, you know what I do when I see childish bullshit like guards with Tasers? I just think to myself, ‘Bullshit. Empty, childish bullshit.'”

Flynn picked up his table knife and tossed it into the wall. There was a crash, the window above the point of impact cracked, and nothing could be seen of the knife except the hole where it had entered. He reached over and took Evans's knife, and began doing surgery on his chicken.

“You people have been at this what—sixty, sixty-five years? And look at you, four guys nursing a piece of equipment you can't even begin to understand. Where's the massive scientific effort? Where's the billion-dollar budget?”

“The parade's gone by. Twenty, thirty years ago at Wright-Pat, it was a different story. Some of the best minds in the world worked on this. The best. For years and years and years, Flynn. And we learned basically nothing. We lost. Now we're what's left, four trudging bureaucrats protecting the secret of the ages.”

“I want to go to the Biology section. I want to meet the people who worked on me.”

“As I said—”

“Let's roll. Right now.” Flynn stood up.

“You're not cleared to go down there, Flynn,” Caruthers said.

“Then get me cleared!”

“You can be. No question. But we have to go through channels, and you know that.”

“Diana Glass cuts red tape like butter.”

“So call her,” Evans said. “Right now. The second she gets you cleared, off we go.”

Flynn said, “Give me a phone. I lost mine.”

“No cell coverage on the island. In any case, if classified matters are to be discussed, we need to go to my office and use the secure phone.”

Flynn followed Evans down a hallway and up two flights to the sort of small office that defined the reality of the middle-level bureaucrat in the federal system. There was a picture of the president on the wall, one of Evans with a high-ranking but nameless air force officer, and an engineering diploma from Ohio State. On the desk were two photographs of which Flynn could see only the backs. There was an in-box with a great deal of paperwork in it and an equally busy out-box. For a man who had portrayed himself as basically a caretaker, he seemed to have a lot of work to do. But these days, when so much was done in digital media, the busy boxes could have been there just for show.

There were two telephones: one an old-style landline secure phone, the other a cheap wireless model. Flynn strode over to the secure phone and called Diana.

She said, “Complaint line.”

“I'm laughing. Now I'm not. They're insisting that I need further clearance to go to Biology.”

“I really don't know how to say this, but going down there could reduce your abilities. Put a level of awareness between you and your new skills that could affect your speed.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“It's dangerous for you to see your records—too much self-awareness could compromise your skills.”

“I want to appeal to your superior officer.”

“I have no superior officer.”

“Sure you do.”

“You can't appeal, and you can't know who he is or where he is or anything about him.”

He hung up the phone.

Evans said, “You heard the same thing from her that we got in this command. Show you the disk, then show you the door.”

Flynn spread his hands. “Okay, I lose. No contest.”

Mac blinked, but said nothing.

They were due to be returned to the mainland at first light, in time to catch the dawn patrol commuter back to LaGuardia. From there, it was a nonstop to Dallas, then another commuter to Menard.

They were assigned two rooms in the small visiting quarters. Flynn had no further reason to spend his time talking to the locals, so he went to his billet and threw himself onto the bed. He assumed that there would be cameras and audio, so he did nothing to reveal his real intentions.

He closed his eyes and began mentally, and very carefully, reviewing the map of the island he'd made in his mind as they landed.

Mac followed him in. “What's the plan?”

“No plan, Mac. The long and short of it is, we busted out.”

“So what happens next?”

He hated to lie to Mac, but right now, the two of them were certainly onstage. Caruthers was listening. His security team was listening. Diana was listening and probably whomever she worked for as well.

“We're due on the helipad at six sharp,” he said. “From there, I think we need to go back to Menard.”

“Menard? Why not Washington?”

“Because they've got their heads so far up their asses, they can see—”

“Oh, yeah, there is that.”

“We need to do what we can to protect Eddie and his family. Just leaving Menard isn't enough to save them. If they even left.”

“You think we're gonna die out there?”

He thought he was going to probably die, but not in Texas. If what he was about to do went wrong in any way, that was going to happen right here, tonight.

“We might as well get some sleep,” he said.

Mac lingered. “Flynn, what was it like in that thing? I mean, that must have been amazing.”

“What it was like is, we're never going to have anything remotely similar, not in our lifetimes or many lifetimes. As you move around inside, the entire interior of the thing changes, depending on what you want to do. It looks about twelve feet high at the center, am I right?”

“Yeah, I'd say so.”

“When you first go in, you find yourself in the motor room. Counterrotating magnets, but we can't make them turn. We don't know exactly what they're made of or what kind of power needs to be applied. Then, say, you want to go to the control room. You just stand up, and it kind of appears around you. Nothing morphs or changes—you're just in another place. It's the most incredible experience I've ever had. The control room is not complicated. Two chairs before consoles with nothing but a couple of handprints embedded in them. Little chairs, but sit in one and it fits you, just like that.”

“Put your hands in the handprints?”