Jack James and the Call of the Tanakee (13 page)

“They took ‘em.”

“Where?” Jack pleaded. “Where did they take them, Teresa?”

She shook her head.

“I have no idea. Why don’t you use the O/A to find out?”

“That seems to be out of the question lately,” Jack said. “For some reason, I can’t find anybody. It’s like whoever has them has cast some sort of shroud over them.”

“Not only that,” Takota said. “It looks like they have technology similar to yours, Jack.”

“I know. What’s with that?”

They looked at Teresa. She shrugged innocently.

“This was never a part of what I was told,” she admitted. “I have no clue who these people are. But whoever they are, they’re powerful.”

“There has to be a way to find them,” Takota said, and it sparked an idea in Jack.

“Wait a second. Maybe there is,” he pressed the O/A. It came alive with light and sound, infusing him with power. “I think I saw something when I was chasing that…that kid, whoever it was.”

A purplish-blue, shimmering sphere grew from the ground up, surrounding Jack as he spoke.

“Come on, Takota.”

“Where are we going?”

“That kid’s power source—it left a trail. I might be able to follow it.”

They said goodbye to Teresa, leaving her to rebuild her house yet again. Then Jack and Takota, in the O/A’s protective sphere, retraced the path they’d taken earlier while chasing the mystery kid. Sure as Jack thought, he found a signature left behind, an invisible stream of highly-pressurized air, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Jack was certain it would lead to the culprit. Further and further they traveled, through deep forest to the shoreline until the trail veered inland again. They followed carefully, watching, tracking like bloodhounds. Finally, after tracing the pressure trail to a large rocky peak in some snowy coastal mountains, it went cold.

Jack and Takota stopped in midair, suspended hundreds of feet up, staring at the mountainside.

“What is it?” asked Takota.

“The pressure stream. It just ends. Right here. It doesn’t make sense.”

They both fell silent for a moment with the O/A’s energy field humming around them. Then Jack took them down, to a rocky ledge on the side of the steep hill, a shelf built seemingly for just the two of them.

“It’s like the trail goes directly into this rock,” he let the O/A power down, wanting to think without the constant constraints of a quadrillion minds chattering all at once inside his head. Deep in contemplation, he noticed Takota stiffen, and then look up.

“Jack! Look out!”

Jack snapped his sights to the sky. There, he saw something that made him jittery with nerves—the strange kid, with the device, closing in fast. Takota vanished and reappeared in front of the speeding kid, trying to block access to Jack. A futile attempt. The kid was too fast. Takota didn’t get there in time, and a glancing blow sent the little fellow spinning, leaving nothing between the two adversaries.

FIFTEEN

“JACK!”

The voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere all at once. He wanted to get his machine and turn it on and fly the heck out of there. He wanted to get that stupid kid—whoever it was—by the neck and take off that mask. He wanted to stop those menacing people who seemed to be perpetually after him and Takota. After their chance meeting back at the supermarket those weeks ago, his whole world had spun out of control, and he wanted to make it right. He knew he could. He just had to get his hands on his machine. Where was it? Where was the O/A?

“Can you hear me, Jack?”

He tried to pinpoint the source of the voice. He was lost, floating in some murky mixture he’d never experienced before and it frightened him. The darkness. The nothingness. Wincing and rolling his head, he felt a sudden aching down his side.

“Be careful with him,” an unfamiliar male voice said. “He’s been through a lot today.”

“I should say so,” he heard someone he knew. A woman. “You guys were pretty rough with him. With all of us. Did you have to be so rough?”

The man said something, but Jack had become too fixated on the woman’s voice to care. As his senses gelled, he wanted to smack himself for not realizing it sooner. That voice.

“Jack! Snap out of it!” someone shook his shoulders lightly and, suddenly, he was no longer trapped in the endless void. He saw light, and willed himself toward it immediately. Falling up, twisting, toppling, reaching for his salvation.

“Mom!” his throat was sandpaper. He tried to sit up. His mother, still a hazy glow in the bright lights, eased him to his pillow again.

“Easy, baby,” she whispered, then turned to someone he couldn’t see beyond the luminescent shroud. “Look what you did!” she raised her voice, and her tone changed sharply. “You call yourselves friends?”

Jack saw a silhouette behind Liz.

“You don’t understand. We had to be quick and covert with your extraction. That’s the only way we could get you out safely. Otherwise the Nagas would’ve been able to track you. This way, you’re safe with the Eteeans.”

“Safe!” Liz came unglued. “You call this safe? Look at what you did to my son!”

“He’ll be fine. Though our extraction methods were a bit…rough, the True Soul didn’t harm him. His Eteea machine was only set to knock Jack unconscious. It was for his own good.”

“Wait a minute,” finally Jack had enough strength to sit up. This time his mother didn’t try stopping him. The place looked like a hospital room on steroids. Tons of life-saving, life-sustaining apparatuses. Shelves and shelves of medicines and sterile instruments and first aid items. Though, by the dark and polished walls and the jagged obsidian ceiling, it wasn’t any sort of hospital he’d ever seen. He tried to focus on the mysterious man his mom was speaking to. “True Soul? Eteeans? What are you talking about?”

His questions fell on deaf ears. Neither his mom nor the man in the shadows said a word. Then Liz bent and wrapped him in a hug. She squeezed tight, but not too tight, showing she understood he was still sore from his encounter with the powerful stranger.

“Oh, Jack!” she said. “I love you so much. No matter what, I’ll always be proud of you.”

“What do you mean?” he pushed away from her. “Mom, what is this man talking about?”

Again, silence. Jack felt his old friends, the stomach butterflies, make an encore appearance, flittering so hard he nearly vomited. He searched his mother’s eyes, then studied the man’s features as they became more and more clear and his vision adjusted. The man wore a military uniform, adding fury to his butterflies. Jack was familiar with the insignia, and knew the man was in the Navy. He also recognized the star and stripes on his sleeves. A commander.

“Would someone tell me what the heck is going on!” he demanded. “Where’s Takota? Where’s the O/A? What’s happening?”

“Jack?”

He found a comforting face—Amelia. She’d been standing beside him the whole time, stroking his hair.

“Amelia,” he begged. “Please tell me what’s going on.”

She sighed deeply, staring into his eyes, but said nothing.

“What!” he became more insistent, turning to his mom, the commander, to Amelia again. They remained silent, faces like statues.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” Amelia said finally. “It’ll still be okay.”

“What will?” he shouted. “What’ll be okay? Why are you sorry?”

A brilliant blue flash robbed Jack’s attention. He tried to get out of bed, but was held back by the intravenous lines and tubes stuck into him. Then he heard something that filled him with both elation and dread.

“DUCK SOUP!”

“DAD!” Jack sprang from the bed, ripping the tubes from his wrists and chest and shoulders. His mom called for him. Amelia called for him. Even the commander, whose identity he still didn’t know, called for him. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. His one and only thought was to locate his father. Ben would have some answers.

He sprinted to the door, and it opened unlike any door he’d ever seen. A shimmering membrane peeled away from the center and he didn’t so much walk through than pass through as if by osmosis. It gave him the strangest sensation, but the weirdness didn’t stop there. Once in the hall, he noticed the place was built of some sort of space-age metal. It was perfectly black, yet had a luminance to it, making traditional overhead lighting unnecessary.

The walls had no windows whatsoever, with rounded passages and arched ceilings. No straight line in sight. In fact, he saw nothing but bright hallway to the left and right. And he heard his father’s giggles. One thing set his mind at ease, and that was Ben sounded in good spirits. But what was he up to? It made Jack mad with curiosity.

“Jack! Wait!”

He didn’t respond. For some reason, he felt they had something to hide, and were concealing it well.

Rounding a long, curved corridor, he found an intersecting hallway. There he took a left, following the unmistakable sound of Ben James and his uninhibited emotions. Not far past the hallway juncture, Jack came upon another series of those same strange doors, entrances to more chambers, each filled with so much glowing, futuristic machinery it all seemed a dream. Jack saw devices that took him back to his father’s lab in their garage. A holographic computer monitor, then another, and another. Soon, Jack started to get the feeling the place was in fact his dad’s lab, only a hundred times bigger.

Then it all hit him when he peered into the next room he came upon. He staggered back and held his chest. That’s when Amelia, his mother, and the commander caught up with him.

“Jack?” Amelia said. “I wanted to tell you before you saw for yourself.”

“We wanted to prepare you,” his mom held his shoulders.

Jack was speechless, his mouth hanging open, probably drooling for all he knew. Inside the large cavity, which appeared to be carved from black glass, on shelves stacked to the ceiling, were not one, not two, but dozens of devices which looked nearly identical to the O/A.

“The Eteea machines,” the commander smiled.

Jack had a million questions, yet at that moment, couldn’t pose a single one. Instead, he wandered into the magical room, through another strange membranous passage. Inside, the place rang like a bell choir. His ears hurt, but soon the pain died down, replaced by a gentle purr, as if the machines sensed his presence and were saying hello. In the middle of it all, in a position of authority, sat the O/A itself, the centerpiece of the collection. He smiled, then turned to Amelia and lost his good humor.

“What is this? What’s going on?”

“Jack?” she pointed to the commander. “This is my dad, Commander Michael Klein of the United States Navy.”

The commander nodded and smiled, shaking Jack’s hand vigorously.

“Welcome, Jack, welcome. We’re honored to have you here, finally. Welcome to the Eteeans.”

“Eteeans?” he gave each of them a puzzled look. “What are the Eteeans?”

“It’s our codename. We’re a team. The Children of the Blue Crystal, along with their Tanakee protectors, as well as those of us in the military acting as support staff.”

“Codename? Support staff?” Jack was still in an abysmal state of bewilderment.

“Jack,” the commander explained.  “We’re an ultra-elite division of Naval Intelligence, so secret most people don’t know we exist. And we exist for one reason and one reason only—to make sure the Children of the Blue Crystal succeed in their mission.”

“Duck Soup!” Ben showed up in a hurry from the maze of twisting and turning hallways. He ran into the chamber with an O/A-type device in his hands, straight past the group as if they weren’t there at all. “The power supply for this unit is remarkable! The Gravitomiton design is flawless! And to think, it was made hundreds of years ago!”

He ran out again, only stopping when Jack screamed, “DAD!”

He turned and his eyes got even bigger.

“JACK! My boy!” he rushed and scooped Jack into his free arm. “Where’ve you been? You’ve missed all the excitement!”

“Uh, no,” Jack said as Ben let him go. “I haven’t missed anything. Didn’t you hear what happened? We were almost abducted by some people with ultra-advanced technology, a lot like the O/A. I’m not sure, but I think they work for the Nagas.”

He chuckled.

“You were abducted, all right. By the same people who took me,” he pointed at Commander Klein.

Jack’s confusion hastened his retreat from the commander, from Amelia.

“What? You’re working with the Nagas?”

“No,” the commander said flatly. “Not at all. We’re fighting against them, just like you. But most of the US government
is
working with them, or, more correctly, for them, either knowingly or unknowingly. That’s why we have to remain so secretive.”

“And that’s why they had to kidnap us like that, Jack,” Amelia tried to catch his eyes with hers. He stared straight at her.

“So, you and your dad,” he accused. “You both have been working in secret the whole time? You knew about this the whole time, Amelia?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t know about any of this,” she looked at her father. “Not until today. But I trust my dad, and I believe what he’s saying, because I’ve been getting visions about this all my life.”

“Jack!” Ben’s enthusiasm bubbled over. “Let me show you what I’ve been working on!”

Jack followed his father into a place that looked like an Eteea machine repair center, to a worktable where, from the ceiling, strong floodlights beamed on a shallow box containing a large hunk of stone.

“What is this?” Jack wondered aloud. “Some sort of archeological relic?”

“Precisely!” Ben’s zeal amplified even higher. Jack noted his dad hadn’t been this excited since he’d first discovered Omnidimensional Energy Absorption. “We found this particular one in the Yucatan. From a lost Mayan temple of the sun. Look here,” he pointed to a section crisscrossed by a grid of thin string, which had been unearthed by gentle, patient hands. Soil removed from solid rock.

“You got here just in time,” Ben placed a pair of safety goggles on Jack’s face, then did the same with his own.

“Just in time for what?”

“Watch,” Ben hit a switch on a holographic panel that popped into existence when he reached for it. Then, from the ceiling, dropped a single, three-inch thick chrome tube. It flexed when Ben took hold, bending into position directly on top of the exposed stone structure.

With a quick jolt, the tube released an invisible shockwave, crumbling the stone into fine powder, and exposing what looked to Jack like a gem. Jack blinked and blinked at the jewel, marveling at the dazzling shapes deep inside its core. Then he blinked again. If it weren’t for the different color, he would have sworn it was yet another…

“An O/A?” Jack was befuddled.

“An Eteea machine,” the commander approached from behind and corrected him. “This one dates back to the eighth century.”

“But how?” he let his puzzlement show. “How can so many machines like the O/A be in existence?”

“Remember that History Channel special I showed you?” Ben continued his work extracting the device from the stone. “It was real. These devices are all over the world. Buried, hidden, waiting for us to find them.”

“But…” Jack walked further into the repair center, spotting all kinds of areas with huge rocks and monoliths and other mounds of earth in various states of excavation. “Why so many?”

Amelia said, “Jack, remember when Teresa told us about the Children of the Blue Crystal? She told us about others like us, all over the world.”

Jack cast an eye over each and every one of the machines.

“I see dozens of these things. You’re telling me there are
that
many other children?”

“Even more,” Ben looked up from his work. The machine inside the rock vibrated slightly when he touched it. “We’re still finding them as we speak.”

“And we’re learning more and more about the Nagas,” the commander said. “They’re ramping up their activity.”

“I think I might know why,” Jack sighed.

“Essinis,” the commander said.

“Wait a second,” Jack eyed the man. “You guys in the military…you know about Essinis?”