The God Wave (36 page)
Authors: Patrick Hemstreet
BOSS FIGHT
Reynolds felt like he was trapped inside a six-foot coffin. He couldn't stretch to full height, and there was barely any space for movement. Luckily his practice had paid off; he'd be using his mind more than manning control switches.
His headset squawked. It was General Howard. Though his voice was filled with static, the message was clear: “Those people are using our base against us. Both need to be destroyed.”
THE CREATURE WAS EASILY TEN
feet tall. Eleven maybe. Tim didn't have a tape measure. It had tank treads for feet and slashing propellers at the ends of its arms to slice through groups of men. There was a siege cannon where its stomach should have been. Its heart was a howitzer.
It was the perfect doomsday weaponâthough Tim noted a few imperfections. Its fish-scale armor was incomplete, and the flamethrowers on its shoulders weren't attached to fuel lines.
It had no eyes in its tyrannosaurus-shaped head, but it didn't
need them. From the pings it emitted, Tim could tell it was using active sonar. And from the way it was advancing, he could tell it had already zeroed in on him.
Tim ran to the far end of the control room, to where Sara had bent the panel back, and slipped through the gap to the lab next door. The
T. rex
robot followed behind, steamrolling over the bodies of its fallen brethren. It shot the howitzer once, tearing a sizable hole in the wall, before Tim reached in and disabled the breech screw. It tried the siege cannon next, but the plunger spring had already been straightened.
Tim crouched in the dark behind a workstation. He couldn't see a thing, but he knew the sound of the propellers as they cut through the brushed-steel wall as easily as opening a tin can. The sound stopped once he disabled the governor drive. But by then the robot was already in the room.
Tim heard the sonar pings coming closer along with the whir of tank treads about thirty feet away. Then the lab went quiet. The only sound left was Tim's heartbeat, which had been the loudest of all.
At once the room was bathed in light so bright, Tim had to divert his eyes. The robot was emitting a searchlight. Its tank treads folded up and tucked inside its body; a clang echoed as massive anchoring mechanisms dropped to the floor. The roboboss was standing its ground.
Tim looked to the right, through the lab window. He thought he saw movement in the hallway. “Reynolds, you worthless bitch! You . . . you yes-man! Why don't you show yourself?”
“Yes, sir. I'm right in front of you.”
The voice was coming from inside the creature. Tim blinked in disbelief.
The behemoth robot was not yet outfitted or tested to be accessed remotely. Reynolds could not control the robot from
without like he'd done with Thorin. But he could control it from within. He proceeded to do so from the circuit-laden and mildly cramped cockpit of the massive metallic beast.
“And now I'm going to show you something else . . . sir.”
A hatch opened in the robot's torso, and a pair of conducting rails started to extend. Looking at the length of them, fifteen feet in all, Tim suddenly got the feeling he was standing on the tracks, staring at a speeding train.
“What in the hell is that?” he asked aloud.
“A rail gun.” Sara had stepped in from the hallway unnoticed. She was standing by the door, holding a medical kit and a portable light in one hand and a six-pack of Dr Pepper in the other.
Tim glanced at her before returning his gaze to the weapon. “How in the hell does it work?”
“I don't know,” she said. “I saw a video of a navy test launch. Once it's deployed it takes about a minute for the projectile to shoot out and reach hypersonic speeds.”
“It's already been almost twenty seconds. Tell me how to disable it!”
“Quickly.”
Tim's mind was blank. He couldn't reach into the mechanism if he didn't know what it looked like. So he did the next-best thing. He reached onto a lab worktable in front of him and grabbed one of the spherical brain cases the Deeps had been working on. Tucking it under his arm, he charged toward Reynolds's robot, jammed it deep inside the gun nozzle, then ran into the hallway and dove on top of Sara.
The implosion was instant.
The pieces of shrapnel lodged in the lab walls were all that was left of the doomsday droid. The blood on the walls belonged to Reynolds alone.
Sara stood up shakily, dusted herself off, turned on the light,
and went to survey the scene through the blown-out window. Neither she nor Tim had a single cut from a sliver of glass. His half-assed armor had saved them.
As she studied the remains of Howard's army smeared across the lab, her reaction surprised even Tim. Sara started to laugh. It was sharp and grating and reminded him of the sound of propellers against steel.
“Let's give the good general a call,” she said. “It's time for him to accept once and for all that the power has changed hands.”
BENEFACTORS
On approach, Lorstad's facility had looked like a stunning, modern home of native stone and glass perched on the edge of a hill. Once they'd entered and moved through the structure, it became clear the house was just the tip of a very much bigger iceberg. It reminded Chuck a bit of Forward Kinetics' headquarters that way, only the effect was much more pronounced.
“We call it simply the Center,” said their guide. “It is the center of our . . . community.”
Chuck turned his gaze from the stunning view of canyon walls and forested mountains beyond and gave Kristian Lorstad his entire attention. “What community is that exactly?”
“We don't really have a name. We're not an organized group in the usual application of the word. Our purpose, though, is to aid mankind in its next steps of evolution. You, Doctor, are well aware that for millennia, mankind has been controllingâor at least affectingâits own evolution. Unwittingly, for the most part. We prefer it to be more conscious and directed . . . and benign.
Men like General Howard pose a threat to that evolution. Men and women like you,” he added, “can help speed it up and determine its course.”
Chuck grimaced; the impact of their work on human evolution was exactly what kept him up at night. “Why us in particular?”
In answer, Lorstad turned and made a gentle gesture at a bronze statuette. It rose from the floor, turned a delicate pirouette in the air, and lowered itself back to its pedestal.
A widening of the eyes was all the reaction Chuck and his teammates showed.
“We have been using external stimuli to produce the desired results. We used it earlier when the Deeps, as you call them, had you surrounded in the car dealership.”
“That was you?” Chuck asked.
“Yes. We were there. But don't imagine that our abilities are always that strong. Because the impulse is external, the adept's abilities do not grow once he or she has achieved a certain level. The treatment, if I may call it that, must also be repeated to retain the effects. You, however, have managed to train adepts to produce and harness zeta waves, thus allowing them to explore and enhance their abilitiesâto diversify their skills by applying what they've learned to new situations. While our abilities are, in a sense, artificial, yours are organic and naturalâin a word, evolutionary. It's remarkable. And it's something we would like to learn from you. We would also like to help you solve this problem that General Howard has created, hopefully in a peaceful manner.”
Before Chuck could respond, a door slid open where there had not been a door. It appeared to be an elevator, its walls softly lit from within. There was a young woman standing in it.
Lorstad smiled as if he were sincerely glad to see her. “This is my colleague, Alexis. She'll be helping you settle in here at the Center.”
The womanâa tall, willowy blondeâstepped from the elevator, which remained open behind her. “Hello, Doctors, Ms. Mause, Ms. Chen.”
“Settle in?” said Chuck. “Settle in to do what? I know you've said you can keep us safe here, that there's no way for Howard to track us, but what do you intend for us to do?”
“To work, of course, Doctor. In fact that's why Alexis has come up to help me show you our operation. Shall we?” He gestured toward the elevator.
They entered and were whisked downward so swiftly and to such a depth that Chuck's ears popped twice. At bottom, the elevator doors slid open on a vista that made Deep Shield look like a steampunk nightmare. The ceiling was far away, gently radiant and curving. The vast, open area was gleaming, sleek, pristine, and possessed none of the Spartan rough edges that seemed an affectation of the militaryâas if comfort of any kind somehow went against their belief system.
People were at work in the sprawling space, seated at computer terminals or standing at large plasma screens that were embedded in the walls. Some of them turned to observe the newcomers and smiled at them before returning to whatever work they did. It was a human gesture, natural, meant to be comforting. So why did Chuck find it unnerving?
Lorstad led them down the center of the cavernous room toward its nether end. “This is the shop floor. We prefer working in an open space. Walls in this environment only cause compartmentalization and difficulty in communication. Your new lab is a separate facility modeled on what you built at Forward Kinetics but larger. We think you'll find it an improvement.”
“Our new lab?” repeated Dice. “What kind of lab?”
“One outfitted with everything you need to do your work. Everything.”
“Wait,” said Eugene. “We've just gotten here, but you already have a lab outfitted for us?”
“Yes. We've been anticipating your visit for some time. Would you like to see it?”
He led them to a featureless set of sliding doors at the far end of the main room. Before they had quite reached them, the doors slid open, allowing them to see a portion of what lay within.
Lorstad gestured at the room. “Go on in, please. It's all yours.”
“Wow,” murmured Dice. He glanced at Chuck, then went through the doors.
Everyone else paused on the threshold, but Chuck knew only why
he
hesitated. He knew entering that room would be a crossing over, an acceptance that what Lorstad had told them on the plane was true: that he and his mysterious benefactors were the only chance Chuck and his team had to remain free, their only chance of reestablishing contact with the other zetas. Stepping through that door would be an acknowledgment that his old life was gone foreverâthat all of their old lives were gone, and they had only this unknown ahead of them.
He turned to Lanfen. “What do you think?”
In answer she took his hand and faced the laboratory doors. “Really, Doc, what choice do we have?”
He looked to Eugene and Mini. They both nodded.
They stepped through the doors togetherâout of their old lives and into an uncertain and frightening future. One that they'd helped to create.
My agent Emma Parry.
PATRICK HEMSTREET
is a novelist, neuroengineer, entrepreneur, patent-pending inventor, special-warfare-trained Navy medic, stand-up comic, and actor. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and sons.
The God Wave
is his first novel.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE GOD WAVE
. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Hemstreet. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition May 2016 ISBN 9780062419545
ISBN 978-0-06-241950-7
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