Extinction Machine (56 page)

“Give me a chance to catch my breath,” I said, “and I’ll be happy to entertain you some more.”

He pretended to think about it. “Nah. Attractive as that offer is. I think I’ll pass. What do you think, Mr. Bones?”

Bones had crawled to the low sofa and pulled his legs up to hide the stains on the front of his pants. “He’s a piece of shit. Kill him.”

“Burke? What about you?”

Burke had to clear his throat to find a voice that didn’t sound like the soprano section of the church choir. “I apologize for any deficiencies in the security. I’d like to thank Captain Ledger for all his help. I think making him eat his own dick is a start.”

“Yes,” hissed Bones.

“Jesus, you guys are brutal,” said Shelton. “But it’s an interesting thought. Let’s keep it on the table.”

“I should have cut your fingers off for real,” I said.

“Yeah, well, that’s why you’re who you are and why I’m who I am.”

I struggled to get to my knees, which was as far as they were going to give me.

“Tell me something, Shelton,” I said. “When you kept blubbering that they were going to kill you … who exactly are ‘they’?”

Howard laughed. “Nobody. Just screwing with your head.”

“You thought I was cutting your fingers off and you were
screwing
with me.”

He shrugged. “I was in the moment. And it worked, too. You bought it. You tried to bargain with me. Nice.”

I shook my head. “Shit.”

In his chair, Mr. Bones made a sound like a tiny, hysterical giggle.

“I wasn’t joking when I said that you helped us out. We shouldn’t be vulnerable here. And you should never have gotten your hands on the book.”

“I’m clever as all get-out,” I said. “Ought to have my own reality show.
Joe Ledger Pisses You Off.
”

“I’d watch it.”

“So, tell me, Howard—what the
fuck
are you doing? I mean. I get why you’re reverse-engineering flying saucers. Big bucks in patents for new technologies, and you get to feed shiny new toys to the military market. That’s a sustainable market, and I don’t really give much of a cold crap about it.”

He nodded. “It pays the light bill.”

“Sure. But I’m pretty sure you’re behind what’s been going on these last few weeks. The cyber-attacks…? That was misdirection, right? Hiding among other victims?”

“Sure.”

“Killing the staff at Wolf Trap?”

“Dual purpose,” he said. “That way I become the main victim, and poor me, everyone rushing to send me flowers and condolences. But we suspected there was a leak at Wolf Trap. Didn’t know who, so…”

“Sixty people to plug a leak?”

Howard smiled. “People don’t mean shit to me. Or, haven’t you figured that out yet?” He tapped his forehead. “I’m brilliant but most of what’s up here is a bag of cats.”

“Don’t bait him, Howard,” said Mr. Bones. “He’s crazier than you are.”

“Um,” I said, “not really looking forward to a contest on that point. Though being framed as a terrorist kind of rattled my marbles. That was you, too, right?”

“Don’t complain,” said Mr. Bones, “we made you a very rich man.”

“I’m public enemy number one.”

“You want us to apologize?” asked Mr. Bones. “Really, go ahead and kiss my ass.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. But what about the ship?” I said. “Big black triangle. That’s yours, right?”

“Kind of.”

“‘Kind of’?”

“We’re not the only ones with a T-craft.”

“But that was you buzzing the Seventh Fleet, right?”

“Nope. That was China out there making a point. And I think they made a pretty solid point. They used what we perceived was their state-of-the-art fighter, a J-22, to lure the American Hornets into a game of chicken, knowing that the Hornets would take them apart. But … the J-22 was the warm-up act and it exited stage right so the real star of the show could make an appearance.”

“The T-craft.”

“Yup. And it flew right through the heart of the fleet at Mach twenty. Ripped past them in a way that said
You can’t catch me and you don’t have anything that can shoot me down
. It was a damn bold statement and I bet it left skid marks in the drawers of everyone from admiral to mess hall cook. It told the fleet and our government that China just won the arms race.”

“Unless we
also
have a T-craft,” I said. “I mean, that’s what the Majestic Project is all about. It’s what you’ve been working on since the forties.”

“Well…,” Howard said, drawing it out. He stood up, holding the Black Book to his chest with the reverence of a priest holding a Bible. “Yes and no. You see, M3 has been working on this, ’round the clock, since Harry Truman cracked the whip. The three governors have overseen that project with great diligence and dedication. But … that’s not the only game in town. Mr. Bones and I, being two of the three current governors, think the M3 project has spent way too much time spinning its wheels. I mean, okay, we made an ungodly amount of money, but it began to occur to us that building a spaceship as a weapon of war was a damn poor way to win the arms race.”

I frowned. “But you just said that’s essentially what the Chinese just did?”

“Not exactly,” he said with a dark smile. “Bones, you want to show him?”

“Not really,” complained Bones, but he got up anyway, looked down at his soiled pants, glared acid lava death at me, and limped to the big curtained wall that formed one side of the room. He touched a button and the curtains whisked back. From where I sat on the floor all I could see through the revealed windows was the rocky ceiling of a cavern. I hadn’t realized how deep we’d gone. When Bones saw that I was still on the floor, he snapped, “Well, come on.”

Under the watchful eye of the guards, I climbed slowly my feet. The room took a sickening sideways lurch and I staggered toward the windows, catching myself on the sill. Then I forgot about bruises, an aching head, or a sick stomach.

Beyond the glass was a massive natural limestone cavern. Longer and wider than a football field. Maybe eight times that big. Dozens of technicians in white coveralls crawled all over the skin of a massive black triangular ship.

But even that wasn’t what kicked me solidly in the gut.

Beyond that ship squatted another. And beyond that, another. And more of them, filling the entire cavern.

Shelton and Mr. Bones had an entire fleet of T-craft.

“Surprise,” said Mr. Bones. “Now you know why we risked everything. Now you know why we couldn’t allow anything to get in our way. China launched the first T-craft. They threw down the gauntlet. This is going to be our response.”

I licked my lips. “You’re going to start a war with China?”

Shelton and Mr. Bones laughed.

“You’re a very small picture guy, Captain Ledger,” said Shelton as he came to stand with us by the window. “We have no interest in
fighting
a war with a nation of one-point-four billion people. That would be nuts. That would be suicide.”

“Then what…?”

Howard looked at his watch. “Our guests should be arriving in a few minutes. They probably have exactly the same thoughts about this that you do. Small thinking.”

He placed one palm flat on the glass as if he could touch the row of T-craft.

“We do not want to fight a war with China,” he said again, his voice softer now, almost distant. “Why fight a war when you can just simply
win it.
No, Captain Ledger, in a little over two hours we will blow the People’s Republic of China off the map.”

Chapter One Hundred Sixteen

VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Monday, October 21, 8:06 a.m

Top Sims tapped his earbud. “Sergeant Rock to Cowboy, copy?”

It was the fifth time he’d repeated the call.

“Damn, Top,” whispered Bunny.

“Is Joe all right?” asked Junie. She knelt between the two soldiers, a small, pale figure in the night, bracketed by hulking shapes in black combat gear.

Top touched a finger to his lips and nodded as a car came rolling over the hill and stopped at the main gate. The guard waved him in. Top watched the car all the way to where it parked by the side of the castle. As the two passengers got out he handed the binoculars to Junie.

“New arrivals,” he said. “Do you recognize either of them?”

She looked—and gasped. “The driver, that’s Erasmus.”

Top nodded and tapped his earbud again. “Sergeant Rock to Deacon, do you copy?”

“Go for Deacon,” said Mr. Church, his voice as clear as if he was standing right there.

“Bookworm confirms visual on Erasmus Tull at Shelton Castle.”

Junie looked at him. “‘Bookworm’?” she echoed.

Bunny leaned close. “It was that or ‘Stargirl.’”

“God.”

Mr. Church said, “Sergeant Rock, I cannot impress upon you strongly enough how important it is for this sighting to be without question. How high is your confidence in the target?”

Junie said, “It’s him. There’s no doubt about it.”

There was the slightest of pauses. “Thank you,” said Mr. Church. “That information is our lifeline.”

Then there was a subtle change in the white noise on the line.

“This is the Deacon. I am alerting all stations and all commands. We have high confidence in our target. Echo Team go to full alert. Backup, put the pedal down. It’s carnival time.”

Bunny chuckled. “Hoo-fucking-ah.”

Chapter One Hundred Seventeen

VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Monday, October 21, 8:09 a.m.

“Oh my God…,” I breathed,
“why?”

“Why destroy China?” Shelton slapped me on the shoulder. “Why end the rising threat that is China? Is that a serious question, Captain? Would you rather have them continue to cut our balls off by making us slaves to their money? Would you like to see us slip farther down the financial tower? China has become the number-one economy and they hold the mortgage to the United States. At the same time they steal ideas, they pirate everything that we have, they’ve built themselves into the number-one global superpower by exploiting our weakness. Our
laziness.
They have a working T-craft now. They can strike us any time they want. That bit of theater in the Taiwan Strait—that was a demonstration of their power. That was them telling us that the Seventh Fleet—the most powerful armada of ships this world has ever known—will no longer be the defining power in global politics. That was them telling us that the arms race is over, Captain Ledger, and they won.”

He got up in my face. “Unless…”

“Unless what?” I demanded. “You start a war with them?”

“No … like I said, this wouldn’t be a war. As of now ‘war’ is no longer a relevant term. It’s archaic, old world. No, what we’re going to do will be a single, decisive stroke that would result in total victory. They have one T-craft, Captain. Granted, it’s a true Device because they got lucky and found most of the right parts, and then begged, borrowed, and stole the rest. We tried to play that game and came up short. We had to build a synthesized engine, a Truman Engine. And here’s a funny thing—although the Chinese have a true Device, they haven’t cracked the synthesis process for making artificial components. That’s our science, and it’s our trump card. They can use that T-craft to threaten us, to do us great harm, but they
need that ship.
That one ship
is
their fleet. But … oh, Captain, we are not building a fleet of ships. We don’t want to get into dogfights or struggle for the supremacy of the skies. Or even of near space. Captain … M3 did not build the Truman Engines for that.”

Shelton touched a button on a control panel mounted into the sill. “T-six you are cleared for departure.”

The T-craft closest to the window suddenly pulsed with white light. It was like a throb, like the first dramatic beat of a heart. Arcs of electricity danced along its skin like white snakes.

“You see that?” asked Mr. Bones. “That’s what is supposed to happen when a Truman Engine fires properly. The energetic discharge is contained and channeled into all shipboard systems. No explosion.”

“It’s a pilot thing,” said Shelton, nodding. “The energy is regulated by the biomechanical matrix. Wicked science, and even though we built these things, we don’t understand where the energy burst comes from. Our other governor, Dr. Hoshino, thinks that the process of firing opens a dimensional gateway to a source of dark matter. She might be right, that part’s more her field than mine. All that matters to me is that Mr. Bones and I figured out how to harness that force. How to use it to fly the T-craft, and how to use these ships as the greatest weapons mankind has ever seen.”

The craft lifted without a tremble. There were no visible engines and none of the struggle against gravity you see with the vertical takeoff-and-landing jets. The craft simply moved upward in a dreadful silence. As it rose above the level of the windows I could see the three round lights near each point of the triangle and a larger central light. It pulsed again, and then the craft began moving away from us, flying over the other T-craft. Men in white jumpsuits cheered and waved at it. As if this was something to celebrate.

“Where’s it going?” I asked, though I already knew.

“China,” said Mr. Bones. “And it will be there right around the time our guests arrive.”

“Guests?”

“Generals and a few congressmen who were convinced that this would be a better use of their time than vying for photo ops in Baltimore.”

“Do they know what you intend to do?”

Shelton smiled. “Not yet.”

“Tell me why you’re doing this.”

“Sure. Sure, I’ll tell you ’cause I’ve read your file and I know that you’re an actual psycho killer, so you’ll appreciate this,” said Shelton.

The bastard was really enjoying this. He slapped both palms on the glass.

“What you see here, all these ships … these aren’t ships, Ledger. These aren’t our fleet. They’re our arsenal. They are
bombs.
”

“Bombs? You’re going to use these things to drop nukes?”