Radiant Dawn (45 page)

"Pursue!" Greenaway barked, and only then looked out the window. Nine o'clock was a curtain of smoke over the center of the crater, and Greenaway grabbed the nightgoggles off the doorman's head and slipped them on, cranking up the infrared reception and narrowing the focus to screen out the blinding napalm glow.

There. It was like seeing the Invisible Man revealed by a splash of paint. Only the reflected heat of the fire gave it away. A streamlined blob of heat dwindled in his sights even as he focused on it, heading southeast on an intercept course with the river. A single Black Hawk with stripped bomb racks, passing even now over the emergency vehicles on the ridge. Only one. Was the other one down there, somewhere, or was it somewhere else in the state, hitting the real target? Were these people sick enough to do something like this as a diversion?

The pilot took them up two hundred feet and raced around the southern edge of Radiant Dawn. "We can overtake them just past Owens River, sir," the pilot said. "We can stay on them until support arrives, then force them down."

"No. They're armed with unconventional weaponry. They're capable of disabling troops at range, and there's only one accounted for. Another one's out there. We'll force
this one
down." He moved into the flight deck, crowded into the narrow space between the co-pilot and the comm officer, so his breath fell on the back of the pilot's neck, and his alpha male pheromones would make it viscerally clear that his authority went way deeper than Army rank. "Knock them out of the sky, Captain. Now."

The pilot started to look around for support, but he couldn't see around Greenaway. He shrugged, flipped up the safety guard on the firing system and vocally prepped it, "Fox One to Target One, locking…" He pressed a button with one thumb, held it for a second, and a nova burst into furious, screaming life under their left wing. "And away," he finished lamely. "That was a
direct
order, right, sir?"

Greenaway didn't answer. They were passing over the emergency scrimmage line themselves, now, and time slowed to a crawl and space scaled down to the tube between the missile and its target, the burn of its thruster a thermal period to the runaway sentence of the helicopter.

Then the missile fell out of the sky. A blip of flame registered on the ground, and swiftly passed under them. "What the fuck was that?" Greenaway demanded. His head flicked around the flight deck, the copilot and comm officer staring at him with hands upraised in surrender.

"It went dead-stick just short of the target. They've got a jamming countermeasure—"

"Bring us in Vulcan range, and shoot their rotors off," Greenaway ordered. His hands balled up into fists, and he knew in a moment they would start shaking. These motherfuckers were like black magicians. They made warfighting into a fucking parlor game with their tricks.

"Sir, we're being hailed," the comm officer said in a passionately scared tone.

"Let's hear it," Greenaway answered. Maybe they'd explain themselves before he shot them down.

A thin, but totally unshakable voice cut in. "Pursuing helicopter, wish to advise we are not armed, and have no hostile intent. You must land immediately and power down—"

Greenaway shouted, "Set down or be shot down, goddamit. I've had enough of this shit!"

"—Unless you are insulated against EMP radiation bursts in excess of—" the rest was washed away in static.

"What is he talking about?" Greenaway blustered. Then it hit him. The bastards could zap them and knock out every onboard circuit. They'd be dead in the air, a stone. "Shoot them down now!"

"We apologize. This is necessary."

The lieutenant saw it first. He was looking northwest at the crater, keeping an eye out for the unaccounted-for Hind, and he screamed that he was blind. Greenaway took off his goggles before he turned around, but even so, he would see the violet ghost image of the sight on the back wall of his eyeballs for days afterwards.

A sphere of white light rose up out of Radiant Dawn valley, filling it with a miniature sun that made the previous conflagration look like a brushfire. Greenaway watched, stunned as it fell in on itself and rose again into a columnar, roiling mushroom cloud.

He was still watching it when he realized everybody else on the chopper was screaming, and all the lights were out.

The flight deck erupted into a fireworks show. The crew struggled to get out of their harnesses, their flight suits burning. The helicopter dipped again, and the forward wall became the floor, the lieutenant flew past Greenaway and smashed into the windscreen, and the other four soldiers rained down on him in a dogpile. The doorman undid his tether and leapt out the open door into the night. Greenaway tried to untangle himself from his men when the chopper slammed into the ground, no, into the river, and green water rushed into the cabin, lifted his men off him and flooded the flight deck. As the waters closed over his head, Greenaway could see only the phosphene echo of the mushroom cloud against the blackness. He reached out, kicking off the flight deck's firewall and fumbling for the rungs that framed the loading door, fighting against the current flooding the chopper until he felt it fall away behind him, and only the sluggish tug of the river's current dragged at his sodden fatigues. Kick, claw, hold your breath a second more, you're almost to the surface, or the bottom…

Floundering onto the muddy shore, Greenaway found only three of his men waiting for him. They raised a ragged cheer as he staggered across the mud flats and snapped them a salute. They looked like death, one of them only semi-conscious, with skull fragments sticking out of his hair. None of them had salvaged a rifle, they had only his sidearm between them. The tail of the chopper stood at a forty-five degree angle to the lazy river. No one else was coming out of it.

The fuckers nuked us
. There was no sane explanation for it, no angle that made it any less nightmarish than the stark reality. He now had to admit to himself that he never knew what the fuck was happening here, and now probably never would.
Goddamned electromagnetic pulse knocked us out of the air. Fucking budget cuts, fucking uninsulated circuits in a fucking old, cheap chopper killed my men and cost us a war.

"I don't suppose anybody has a radio that works?" Greenaway said.

One of the soldiers took out his belt kit and opened a Zip-Loc bag with a PRC emergency beacon in it. "This ought to work, sir," he mumbled, "but what're you going to tell them? Those fuckers are gone."

Greenaway's smile reassured the shivering soldier. "I know where they're going."

Stella knew when Delores Mrachek apologized to her for the way she'd been treated this last week that they weren't going to be leaving with the others. She watched as the last load of medical specimens was shuttled out of sickbay and down to the motorpool, and she'd looked at Mrachek to find her looking uncomfortable, so Stella knew she needed a favor. It was something she couldn't just make her do, which made her wonder. What was so damned important that it couldn't wait, when everyone else had taken off in separate cars exactly sixty minutes after the helicopters left?

"What do you want me to do?" Stella asked.

Mrachek blinked, but said impassively, "I'd appreciate your help moving a very sick man."

Stella thought of Napier and grimaced, but he was dead, wasn't he? She'd seen nobody else that merited special attention. She shrugged and followed Mrachek down the hall, back into the empty warren of tunnels to a vault door which Mrachek had to enter a code to open. Hot, ionized air blasted her, and she thought of a walk-in microwave, but Mrachek walked into it, merging into red shadows and looking back at her as if to make her feel foolish. It worked, and she walked into the room.

Until recently, this must have been the hub of the Mission's operations, but now it was deserted, but for one technician in a white paper cleansuit, seated at a computer terminal. Stella looked around at the walls of the octagonal room, walls that were skyscrapers of computer chips from the spotless bare concrete floor to the ceiling, lost in the dark above the red bulbs. She wondered that anyone would want to work in darkroom light, then supposed that geeks liked to feel their work was dangerous and important.

Mrachek stood by the lone computer technician, patiently waiting to get his attention. Stella walked up on her faster than she'd intended, came dangerously close once again to violating the no-touching rule. "He looks like he got better. Why don't we go? The light is giving me a headache."

"White light makes his corneas bleed," the technician said in a thick Hindi accent. "He will be ready in a moment, if you will please wait here."

"Dr. Armitage is a great man," Mrachek said. "A giant in the field of applied physics, he has suffered grievous neurological damage, and requires special handling."

"Then why wasn't he moved first?"

"He wouldn't go until the birds were in the air," Mrachek said, "and there's lots of computer records to be dumped, or changed, in places that're hard to get at. I need your help."

"She doesn't trust me to do it," the tech said.

"Shut up, Vijay. Go up topside and get the van ready."

"Madame Dr. Mrachek, I designed the final release version of the guidance system software of the Phobos antisatellite system before my twenty-fourth birthday, and I am now thirty-eight. I am not a soldier, and I am no one's porter."

"Do you see anyone else here? Just get the godblessed van, already."

Vijay stood and turned on Dr. Mrachek. He yanked off his surgical mask and polished his thick glasses with it. His dark face was traced with worry lines, and his bushy eyebrows were shot through with gray. He smirked in anticipation of something to be savored before he said it, but a frail voice from an intercom at his workstation cut him short.

"Vijay, I'm just about finished in here. Is my ride here, yet?"

"Make yourself decent, Cornelius," Mrachek said. "We don't have time to mess around."

Vijay entered a code at his workstation and a false wall opened up on a tunnel, and he waved them in. It was even darker in here, and she stumbled into the doctor when she stopped just short of a dull green glow around a corner. "He is still a very brilliant man, in full possession of his faculties. What you see is not who he is."

"I'm a nurse," Stella said. "I won't make fun of your boyfriend."

Mrachek went around the corner and Stella followed her. The man on the bed wasn't the worst-off specimen of humanity she'd ever seen, but he could've given Seth Napier a run for his money in the swimsuit competition. His skin was so mottled Stella couldn't tell if he was black or white, he twitched so badly she couldn't see his face at all, and patches on his skull and neck were so silvery-shiny she could almost see her own reflection in them. He wore only a robe, but looked as if he were wearing wrinkled leopard-print pajamas underneath. This, she realized with chagrin as Mrachek laid open the robe to take his pulse, was his bare skin. A splatter of melanomas covered him from shoulders to belly. His hands roamed the bedsheets like starving rodents and, upon discovering each other in his lap, seemed to devour each other. Mrachek shot her a silencing glance, then returned to Armitage, whispering in his ear.

Stella busied herself looking elsewhere, at the sick man's computer terminal, at the pharmacopoeia neatly arranged in a wheeled caddy beside the bed, at the stained blueprints on the walls. She recognized them immediately, though she'd never seen it from the air. Radiant Dawn. They'd held out the promise of surviving her cancer, and she'd turned her back on them in rashness, joined the people who were going to exterminate them. Had Dr. Keogh seemed so insane, or so sick, as this?
I belong here,
she thought.
With these sick, cast-off killers
.

Mrachek showed Stella how to inject Armitage in the tender part of his scaly, shivering spine, just below his occipital ridges, while she monitored his heart rate. They had to do it seven times, as his dosage fluctuated wildly, and, she explained, his excitability made him resistant. Stella didn't ask what was wrong with him besides the obvious, or what the drugs were supposed to do.

"Dr. Mrachek tells me you're interested in our pilot study," Armitage said. Stella drove home the last needle and injected him with something that looked like antifreeze.

"I have six months to live, is what they told me in Bishop."

"Stick by Delores. She's an unlovable sociopath with an unhealthy codependency fixation on yours truly, but if anyone can find a cure, it'll be her."

The intercom on Armitage's workstation bleeped a long string of meaningful-sounding bleeps. Mrachek entered a code into the computer, and a command window came up with "Descrambling" in it, and an avalanche of digits. The bleeps abruptly transformed into the unflappable voice of Dr. Wittrock.

"You're supposed to be gone," Wittrock said.

"But we're here," Armitage snapped back. What news?"

"There were setbacks. The previous Mission parameters will have to be adjusted, in light of the new developments."

"Such as?" Armitage started shaking worse, Mrachek's restraining hands on his shoulders, he was trying to get up, but his feet seemed content to dance around each other and ignore him.

"The Radiant Dawn compound was destroyed, with a probable one hundred percent casualty rate. Unfortunately, RADIANT was not approachable from the site, and is still up. I have vital telemetry data that will allow us to fix its position at a later date, after regrouping with Aranda's cell. We have no confirmation on Keitel's death, for reasons I'll have to explain at length later. We're proceeding with our original evasion plan, but that's going to present a few snags as well."

"Quit talking in circles, dammit! What's the problem?"