The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (37 page)

“Two fifty,” Erling announced, and Kuhn confirmed.

Shaw wasted no time enjoying his small victory. “Annalise, start our descent and then hold at ten thousand feet. Wulf, get me a screen on Lake Geneva and a map. I want to see where we’re aiming. Taveena, get ready for our first drop. I want something big that’s going to get everyone’s attention.”

“Where do you want them?” she asked, her voice still filled with anger.

Wulf had an overview of the twinkling lights over Geneva up on the screen in front of them.

“Damn, it’s still dark here too,” Shaw said.

The lake wouldn’t get any notice. It had to be in the city. But where?

A dark line across the lights of the city caught his eye. The Rhone. It drained Lake Geneva right through the middle of the city. He remembered walking along it after learning about Ellie’s pregnancy. Every few hundred feet, a bridge of streetlights crossed it, but otherwise it would be totally free of people.

Shaw pointed to a dark spot on the river between the two bridges closest to the lake. “There. Between the first two bridges. I remember a small island right in the middle of the river, a park or something. There shouldn’t be anyone there this early in the morning, but it’s surrounded by people. It’ll definitely get noticed.”

“What’s our altitude, Annalise?” Taveena asked.

“Twenty-five thousand feet and dropping fast.”

“We’ll wait until fifteen thousand,” Taveena said. “They’ll be too big if we go now.”

“No! Release it now!”

Taveena didn’t reply, but stayed focused on her controls. “Fifty spheres have been released.”

“I want eyes on that island!” Shaw called.

Wulf worked again, and after a few seconds Shaw saw a view of the island from the nearest bridge.

“Spheres are already two inches in diameter,” Taveena said. “They have seventeen thousand feet to fall. … Now six inches in diameter.”

“Already?” Shaw asked.

Taveena shot him a withering glance. “This was your idea. Drop them from a great height and the rush of nitrogen atoms will cause them to grow much faster.”

Shaw nodded. “How big will they be when they hit?”

“At the current pace … eight feet in diameter.”

Shaw watched the small island, which rested unknowingly in the path of fifty massive spheres. It, and the city around it, was peaceful and slumbering. Would the impact hurt anyone nearby? “At least these are hollow,” he mused.

He tore his eyes away and looked at the main screen. Still dark. “What’s happening inside the dome?”

“Spheres are nine feet in diameter. They’re starting to bump up against each other and begin moving. I wouldn’t be surprised if people are starting to catch some noises here and there as they scrape against each other.”

“How long until they’re within visual range of the Installation at this pace?” Shaw asked.

Taveena weighed the question. “Without the lights? Ten minutes. Most of them started growing around the edges, so they’ve got a ways to go.” She turned her attention back to the read-out of the falling spheres. “Five thousand feet to go. Three feet in diameter. Twenty seconds to go.”

Shaw watched the island. It was too dark to see if there was anyone on the island, and when it truly came down to it, he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

“Ten seconds.”

Everyone was focused on the image of the small island in the middle of the river. Shaw discovered he was holding his breath and let it out slowly.

“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two.”

One second the island was there, the next second, a hailstorm of fifty spheres—each eight feet in diameter—smashed into it at 200 miles per hour. A violent explosion of debris rocketed away from the island. Splinters of trees and chunks of concrete hurtled into the river, with lighter pieces clearing the river and landing on the road and bridge surfaces surrounding the island.

Pieces of glass shattered in the windows nearby, tinkling down onto the roadway. Shaw was instantly glad he hadn’t asked for audio.

The island was no more. A pile of massive spheres—some of them broken and shattered, others still remarkably intact—entirely filled the space between the bridges and roadways, piling up and filling the riverbed.

Shaw couldn’t help but let out a short barked laugh of relief. “I think that will get someone’s attention finally.”

“If that’s what fifty can do, think what the next thirty-nine thousand nine hundred fifty will do,” Wulf chuckled.

“Holding at ten thousand feet,” Annalise announced.

“Move us out over the lake. Let’s show them something really interesting.”

“Look!” Erling shouted, pointing at the main screen.

Iverson was moving fast now. People were streaming in the doors, and Shaw recognized the changing pattern of the lights inside the command room. The entire station was on full alert.

Suddenly the interior of the dome was fully illuminated, as the Installation’s floodlights blazed on.

“Give me audio in the command room!” Shaw called.

Braybrook had just strode in and was standing in the center of the room with Iverson.

“What do we know?” Braybrook asked.

“Some kind of attack in Geneva using spheres like the raiders used for communication. But huge spheres, eight or nine feet across. Much bigger than we knew they could be. They fell right out of the sky like a meteor.”

“An attack on the Geneva Lattice?”

Iverson shook his head. “On the city itself. I might have jumped the gun by going to full alert since we don’t know if it has anything do with the Lattice, but since it was those spheres again … I didn’t want to take any chances.”

“Agreed,” Braybrook said.

“Sir!” A voice from off-screen shouted. “We’ve got visual reports of a sphere inside the dome!”

“Get it on a screen!”

Shaw found himself watching a screen of Braybrook and Iverson watching a screen.

He looked back at the screen that showed the interior of the dome to get a sense of what they would be greeted with momentarily. Thousands of spheres, surrounding the Lattice Installation on all sides. Under the bright lights, their advance was very clear. At least ten feet high, the dark spheres were rolling ever closer, pushed by the growth of the spheres behind them, which in the distance Shaw could make out doubling up against the sloping interior of the dome.

Looking back at Iverson and Braybrook, he got to watch their first reaction as the spheres were shown on their screen.

“My God,” Braybrook said. “There must be thousands of them.”

Iverson stared, his mouth agape, mute.

“They’re barely moving … what do you think they’re playing at?” Braybrook said. He got no response. “Iverson!”

Iverson snapped out of his state of shock. “What direction are we looking at, Bailey?” he called.

“West, sir!”

“Get me a visual on all four sides. Manza, jump back, tell me how long these have been there.”

Iverson turned to Braybrook. “Sir, I recommend evacuating all nonessential personnel out the tunnel as fast as we can.”

“We don’t even know—” Braybrook started.

“Sir, the primary defense of the Installation has just been breached. We don’t know how, we don’t know why, but until we do, we need to evacuate everyone not directly involved in our defense.”

Braybrook opened his mouth to reply, and then snapped it shut. He nodded. “I’ll broadcast the order to evacuate.”

Shaw closed his eyes, grateful to finally hear those words uttered.

“Visuals on all four sides, sir,” a voice came.

Iverson checked out the screens around him and visibly shuddered. “Entirely surrounded … how did this happen?”

“They started growing just under ten minutes ago, sir,” a second voice reported. “Simultaneously on all sides, right at the base of the dome’s wall. As they grew they started pushing closer. And, sir? They’re still growing.”

Comprehension dawned in Iverson’s eyes. “They’re not going to stop growing. Not until they fill up the dome and crush everything inside it. Do we have any lasers inside the dome, Manza?”

“All ground-based lasers are outside the perimeter, sir. And the space lasers …”

“Dammit! Manza, find anyone who has a hand laser and take them to the lower roof around the Lattice tower. Fire at anything coming at you. Let’s see if we can take any of these things out.”

“Taveena?” Shaw asked, hoping for her assessment of their plan.

“It won’t work. Four or five lasers on the same sphere for a couple seconds could destroy one. But they don’t have enough lasers or enough time to make even a dent.”

“The sooner they figure that out, the better. Erling, how’s the evac?”

“Very orderly, sir. Down to one hundred eighty people already.”

“It’s getting crowded at the exit, but that squares with what I’ve seen,” Kuhn said.

“Tranq?” Shaw asked.

“We’re all lit up outside the dome. Some activity in the air since the full alert was called, and now a lot of ground transportation to get people away from the tunnel exit. But otherwise nothing of note.”

“All right. We’ll keep checking in on you guys. But since we’ve already given Geneva a taste, I think it’s time we put on our real show.”

The sky over Geneva had warmed to a dark blue, with only the brightest stars visible. No rays of light had crept over the hills to hit the clouds, and the pinks and yellows of sunrise were still many minutes away.

The still lake was dotted with a few early morning fishing boats, some moored yachts, and a passenger ferry on its way up the lake.

From ten thousand feet, the lake looked tranquil, but on the surface, each boat was a mixture of confusion. Reports of glass spheres falling from the sky and destroying an island in the middle of the Rhone were on every screen and wrap. Only those fishermen who had left the shore without any Lattice reader on board were in the dark—and even they had heard the thunderous noise carry over the water from Geneva.

Many of them were puttering toward shore, their lines still in the water trailing behind them, hoping for a final catch before being chased off the lake. Yacht captains near Geneva were making preparations to move their yachts to a safer location up the lake—when the crew wasn’t loading into dinghies and abandoning the ship altogether. The passenger ferry was pushing the limits of its engines to flee the city and the narrow confines of the Petit Lac that formed the western end of the lake.

Looking down on it all was Byron Shaw, like Zeus with a quiver full of thunderbolts. He pointed to a deep point in the middle of the lake that was already free of boat traffic.

“Center the storm right here, Taveena,” he said. “Get ready for three thousand spheres. I want a mix of all sizes.”

“For how long?”

“Continuously for the next three minutes. One thousand spheres a minute. How many will that leave us?”

“Just over thirty-five thousand.”

“Barely any,” Shaw smiled. “Ok. When the three minutes is up, release everything. Seven thousand a minute for five minutes.”

Taveena’s hands flew over her controls. “The sequence is set.”

“Annalise, have the ship prepared for the drop exactly six minutes after the storm begins. Shut down invisibility and then drop us into the center of the storm.”

She sighed, but nodded. “The
Walden’s
ready.”

“Buckle up, everyone!” Shaw called. He belted himself into his command chair and waited until everyone else had done the same thing. “All right, Taveena. Let’s make it rain.”

Looking up at the sky from the lake surface—which was the view on one of the screens in the
Walden
—the spheres were first just black pinpricks on a dark blue firmament, like the reverse of stars. A constellation of dark matter in the sky.

Unlike stars, however, these new objects were getting larger—quickly. From the ground, they were still indistinct. But as they neared the lake, they filled more of the sky with the menace of a swarm of bees. Or German bombers over London. How many could there possibly be?

No boats were in their direct path, but anyone who saw the spheres coming steered as far from them as they could.

Nearly a full minute after they were first visible from the ground, the first sphere plunged into the surface of Lake Geneva with great splashes, each at least twenty feet high.

It was a small drop compared to the massive hailstorm of spheres behind it.

Some looked small, only a foot or two across. Others were huge, four or five times longer than the fishing boats that had scurried out of their way. Each pummeled the lake—larger splashes overlapping and interrupting smaller splashes, turning the previously placid surface into a cauldron of bubbling and spewing coronas of water.

As the spheres kept falling into the lake, the spheres that had fallen before them were trying to rise to the surface, their hollow cores making them buoyant. But with the onslaught from the air, they kept being beaten back down again, until one would find a stray opening and shoot into the air a few feet, coming to float on the margins of the spherestorm, pushed closer and closer toward shore by the waves kicked up at its center.

As they were pushed farther from the center, the surface of the lake became more and more cluttered by the glass floats.

No one’s eyes were on the surface, however. Around the shore, French and Swiss alike stood in their bathrobes and pajamas, each staring at the sky in wonder.

Just when it felt like it had gone on forever—who could imagine spheres falling from the sky for a minute, let alone three—it was as if the heavens opened up. The first barrage was but a small taste of what was to come.

The air was filled with spheres. The ones that had already fallen were pushing up against the shores and the docks, cracking pilings and pushing boats up out of the water and onto the small beaches.

Each new strike of a sphere against the water was like an old gun’s blast—and with so many now coming one on top of another, it was more like Civil War cannon fire, the echoes carrying over the hills to the closest town.

With the storm expanded, and the spheres pushing in all directions on the shore, the people ran, covering their ears and scrambling to get as far from the lake as they could. Even those watching from a feed somewhere were shocked at the scope and how far they had to zoom back from Geneva to view the whole storm at once.