Class Fives: Origins (46 page)

Off to his left he heard the dull thump and the loud hiss, snapping his head quickly enough to catch sight of the shoulder-launched missile streaking toward him.

Without breaking stride, he raised his arm and tried to judge the velocity of the projectile, suddenly swinging wildly out to try and slap it away. He managed to catch a small part of the thing, but instead of ricocheting off, it detonated into a sudden ball of fire and needle-fine steel bits.

So much for that, he thought, feeling the upper portion of his flight suit shredding around his shoulders and chest, and stepped up to plant a foot on the low platform as delicately as he could so as not to collapse the thing.

He boosted himself up and stormed the dozen feet along the plastic surface to the side of the dome. He didn’t hesitate, stepping straight against the dome’s side, shooting out both hands and chopping at the thick, shimmering fabric peeking out from beneath the vegetation and ooze with the edge of his hand. It split, instantly releasing a gale of cool air, and he stepped through the tear.

Inside the space was vast, like a temporary aircraft hanger, shrouded in gloom broken only by widely spaced lights from somewhere high overhead. The floor was smooth, white and solid across its interior, except for a clearly bare patch in the very center of the dome.

The space was utterly empty, like the ice in a hockey arena. But suspended high up toward the distant, curving ceiling, was a lumpish-looking pod of some kind, with no apparent means of reaching it.

Around him the air hissed, the pumps whose job it was to keep the dome inflated kicked into high, fighting the sudden, unexpected tear in the skin of the inflated space.

The shots echoed through the air and Roger turned to see the man, an automatic weapon leveled and spitting tiny flicks of flame from its muzzle as the man walked with swift steps toward him. Roger looked around for something to toss at this new annoyance, but nothing presented itself.

He reached to the cuff of one of his shredded sleeves where the jumpsuit had a small pocket closed with a button. He popped off the small, plastic disk and worked it between his fingers. He raised his hand and flicked. The button cut through Constantine Gvorshin’s body, a fine spray of red mist clouding the air behind him just before he dropped awkwardly.

Roger turned back to scan the space. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen right here and very, very soon.

He stepped toward the center of the space, seeing the hanging device high overhead loom further and further upwards but growing larger, more details presenting themselves.

He stopped and turned his gaze slowly toward the edges of the enclosure. No skeleton, no bracings, nothing intended to hold the thing suspended. Nothing he could pull loose or break or rip from the wall. He would probably have to tear the whole circumference of the skin of the place to make the hanging device drop to the floor. And there was nothing to throw to try and disable –

A stinging whine of noise cut through the air as a brilliant, incandescent light shot down from the suspended thing, causing Roger to flinch and whirl back, casting his gaze upwards. The suspended machine had suddenly sprung to life. A thick, blinding beam of pure white light was pouring into the center of the floorless patch in the middle of the space.

The whole building shuddered and Roger could feel the floor beneath his feet tremble.

Then the strange wave of something boiled over him, filling the huge space. Some imperceptible something that caused the dome to sag, the thin steel skeleton holding up the device moaning in protest. Roger heard the rapid crack, and the flooring beneath his feet gave way. He landed in the soggy ground that spread out a couple of foot under the artificial surface, and instantly began to sink.

Above him the structure continued to whine and shiver as the gravitational field beneath the device changed, increasing rapidly.

He felt himself being pulled, sucked down into the sodden ground, and looked around wildly, searching for something to anchor himself. Without thinking, he shot out a hand and closed his fingers around the support structure for the flooring and laid back, spreading his mass as flat as he could. Then he wriggled over onto his chest and delicately began to pull himself free of the capturing ooze. At last he managed to pull his legs free of the sucking mud and carefully reached up to try and hoist himself back onto the flooring above him.

It gave way with a sharp snap and slapped flat on the swampy mess in which he now lay. But it did not sink. It merely settled. Roger gripped its farthest edge and slid himself slowly onto it, then reached up and slapped down the next section of plastic.

Whatever was happening was happening right now, he realized. But he was helpless. He had no way to rip the machine down from so high overhead, and nothing to block the searing beam, perhaps interrupt whatever it was intended to accomplish.

Oh, he suddenly realized. I do have something.

He reached up to slap down the next piece of flooring, and the next, hauling himself over them like stepping stones in a roiling stream, toward the place where the beam was now drilling into the bare ground below the flooring, causing it to sizzle and glow.

At the place where the beam was now beginning to cook the soggy mush that was the ground, he could make out through the blazing beam of light a container of some kind, sitting on a low platform at the eye of the light. Deep within it, something dark was just forming a single dot of pure black within the blast of light. The black spot seemed to ripple and quiver, and then seemed to become more solid, more substantial. More real.

At last he had crawled to the area where the flooring stopped to allow the light clean access to the container.

He paused to shoot a glance up toward the origin of the light above him and squinted against its blinding brilliance. But it wasn’t hot, he realized. All light, no heat. But was it light? There was something odd about it.

He pulled his gaze back down, wriggled his body sideways, and rolled sharply off the supporting shard of flooring right into the beam.

Shooting out his arms, he swept up the container, landing on it, curling it in tight against his chest, shielding it from the illuminated attack from above.

For the first time in his life, Roger felt pain.

For the first time in his life, he screamed.

Something impacted his body, hard, and he felt himself being pressed, driven, into the soggy muck, the container being buried beneath him. But he shot out one arm, wide and tense, willing himself to stay afloat.

Then the light shattered, its orderly beam splattering off his back in all directions to reflect on every surface, every confining enclosure within the huge dome. In a second the air within the space heated like a broiling oven and began to expand.

The temperature shot upwards and in seconds the strong, pliant plastic of the walls began to glow, incandesce, then ignite spontaneously.

Inside the container on which he lay the weary batteries that had sustained the miraculous magnetic field died away.

The monstrous nucleus, freed from its confinement, did what it had been straining to do since its creation.

It detonated.

Olga Nevski, was walking across the wide yard of her isolated farmhouse with the basket of kernels for the chickens when the light flashed on the distant horizon. She stopped and peered toward it. It was as if bright sunlight was reflecting on some shining object.

The boom of the blast hit seconds later and the ground shuddered.

The basket slipped from her grip and hit the dirt, spraying its bounty everywhere.

Far into space above the site, several satellites received conflicting data. In the isolated deeper regions of Russia, a blast of pure light exploded outwards toward the Heavens. This would normally have been interpreted by the onboard software as the bloom of a missile launch or a detonation. But other sensors picked up no trace of the accompanying energy wave that was a natural byproduct of an explosion. Nor, surprisingly, was there any other sort of radiation. No gamma rays, alpha waves or any of the other emissions one would expect with a nuclear blast. Nothing but this single, sudden, bright light.

The onboard software of each of the satellites ran a quick diagnostic, and concluded an anomaly had occurred. It bundled the recorded data into digital pulses, encoded them and broadcast them down to the surface, where puzzled technicians would wonder over the strange data until eventually someone came, collected it and they were told to forget ever having seen it.

The dome and several thousand square yards of the surrounding soggy ground had vanished, leaving a bare hole, several times the height of a man, into which the remaining water around the edges of the crater was beginning to drip.  In time most of the surrounding ground would drain its excess water into first this deep pond, finally this new lake, leaving the vegetation rich soil in its wake. But whatever had been here, whatever had caused that first blast those many years ago, had made this a cursed place which no one would approach; that thing was now gone. Something had been slammed shut.

16

Emergence

      Crawford leaned slowly back in his chair, watching the bright, wide, sudden bloom of pure light through the eye of the satellite on the large TV screen that occupied the far wall of his office, and wondered for that breathless second whether it meant the end of the world.

But then it began to fade, the image darkening back to its normal, muted shades, the view of the spreading countryside far beneath beginning to refocus.

No, he realized. This wasn’t the end. This was what success looked like.

He watched the light fade to a spot and finally die, leaving only a common, gray mass in a huge circle around where the light had been. From the long shadow being cast by the descending sun, it looked quite deep.

Around him, in his office, their eyes fixed to the large TV screen, were various analysts and staff who were aware of the significance of the event, their own tension electrifying the room. But as they began to realize that they had not just been witness to the end of their own lives, a ragged but earnest whooping and cheers boiled up among them.

“All right,” Crawford said after a moment, loud and firm, “Let’s quiet down. We’re still working.”

Quickly the burst of excitement was stifled, and solemn, studious expressions were assumed.

Crawford turned his chair away from the screen and looked over at where most had gathered.

“Now,” he said, “We need to get in touch with State and coordinate on our offer of assistance, which we most assuredly will be making. I want people in those teams. Use medical cover, but they’re to focus on sampling of the site.”

Several of the staff were already jotting notes.

“As part of that team,” Crawford went on, “We need to fold in an extraction scenario. We had an asset on site and we need to get him out.”

He paused to think a moment.

“What’s going on in Montana?”

One of the analysts glanced down to refer to a long page of notes.

“There are teams on-site,” he said, crisply. “Agent White has been recovered from the domicile and we have Montgomery and another suspect in custody.”

“What about the other asset?”

The analyst scanned his notes and shook his head.

“No data about him.”

Crawford’s brows furrowed.

“His recovery is priority.”

“Yes sir,” the analyst said and moved swiftly out the door and down the steps to the main room.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Crawford said, sweeping them with his gaze, “We skated on very thin ice this time. Now, that’s nobody’s fault. We’re all new to this. It’s learn as you go. We all know that. But, now that we’ve had an actual event, I want you to start incorporating the variables into your scenarios. Get a sense of what to expect. The next time we get something like this, and I guarantee you we will, we need to be ready. We were lucky this time. Let’s not have to depend on that again, all right?”

There were firm nods of agreement and faint, encouraging mutters among the group.

“All right, that’s it. We need to clean it up. Thank you for your attention.”

They didn’t linger, but moved briskly out of the office and back to their tasks in their own offices, scattered throughout the non-descript office building that sat quietly and unnoticed across the river from the capitol.

There was still much to do.

All evidence of this entire affair would have to be gathered, hidden, destroyed or otherwise removed, and he already had teams working on that. After the discovery of the girl and the body of agent White in the small house in Providence, carefully shaped stories about a notorious serial killer, a bald man who usually dressed in a dark suit, currently in custody, had been circulated.

No clever press releases were needed about the frail old man living in the abandoned missile silo bunker, also in custody. He had very effectively removed himself from the notice of the world for so long that Crawford would be happy to respect his desire to remain unknown.

Russia was a different matter. The emergency assistance team would be a good cover for his own people, and with any luck they would find the asset.

And the way things were in that backward country, it was even possible the Russians would think it was something of their own that had gone wrong. He would deposit hints of a fault in the abandoned and ancient nuclear reactor that had powered the original experiment those long decades ago. After all, the Russians were aware of the limitations of their technology. It would be a bitter pill to swallow, but after having experienced Chernobyl they would accept it, if grudgingly.

He took a moment to draw in a deep breath, realizing that he would at last be able to head home, get a good, stiff drink and sleep in his own bed.

That thought caused him to wonder about the two new assets. The Class Fives. And he had two of them.