Tara took a few minutes to fix her makeup before going next door with Clark, keen to downplay things for Emma’s benefit, at least for now. She explained this to Clark and in his mind it said a lot about Tara that she seemed to be worrying more about how her ordeal would affect Emma than anything else.
“Hey, guys,” Dan said when he saw them.
Emma wasn’t so easily fooled. Hurrying to Tara’s side, she saw through the facade: “What’s wrong?”
As the tears began and Clark’s expression hardened like stone, he asked everyone to sit down and listen carefully, because he didn’t want to tell the story twice.
After listening in growing disbelief and anger as the story of Tara’s kidnap twisted and turned to its warehouse-based conclusion, Emma jumped to her feet and dashed across the room as soon as Clark revealed that Jack Neal was locked in the basement.
Clark caught up with her before she made it down to the chair Jack was humanely but securely bound to, ensuring that she wouldn’t do anything too reckless before Dan had a chance to hear exactly what the scoundrel was thinking.
“Business is business,” Jack said as soon as the tape was removed from his mouth, staring at Emma with a surprising defiance in his snake-like eyes.
She stopped in her tracks.
He had known she was coming, obviously and inevitably, and this was what he had chosen to say. Lashing out might not be something he wanted her to do, since he was bound and utterly defenceless, but it was more than likely what he expected.
Dan, seldom struck by violent urges, could barely resist the temptation to lunge at Jack and deal with him once and for all. Instead, he subtly touched his thumb to his middle finger and pointed at Jack.
“Does Cole know you’re working with Poppy?” he asked.
“No,” Jack replied, surprisingly straightforwardly.
He was telling the truth. This didn’t surprise Dan given how clearly he had sensed Cole’s hatred of the GeoSovs, but rather provided very welcome confirmation.
“And are the triangles real?” Dan asked, moving on without revealing Jack’s thoughts to anyone just yet since he didn’t want Jack himself to know about the power.
Jack gave a confused frown. “What the hell else would they be? And you should know, you’re the Messengers’ messenger boy!”
Whether he was right or wrong, Jack was again telling what he thought was the truth.
“One last question for now,” Dan sighed, aware of how little time remained before the big moment in Beijing. “Were you in on the plot to take Slater hostage at the Buenos Aires Gravesen?”
At this, a broad grin crossed Jack’s face. “Of course not,” he lied.
“We’ll deal with you later,” Dan said, once again glancing at a clock on the wall before heading to the stairs and urging Clark and Emma to follow him.
Upstairs, with just a few minutes left, Dan quickly relayed Jack’s unspoken answers to the others. There were no real surprises so far, and Emma was primarily relieved that Dan had been able to hear anything without feeling searing pain as he had the previous day.
“What are we going to do with him?” Henry asked, having stayed upstairs due to the lack of wheelchair access to the basement. Mr Byrd had stayed at his side in disbelief along with Phil, who didn’t think he would have been able to refrain from decisive violence, and Tara, who couldn’t face the thought of looking at Jack ever again. “What are we going to do once we’ve got everything we need, I mean. We have his phone, and Dan can hear what he’s thinking.”
No one else said what all of them were thinking.
Eventually, Emma broke the tension: “I’m not going to tell anyone to do it, but the world will be a safer place when he’s dead.”
Despite the weight of her words, the air in the room felt lighter once they were out. No one spoke against them.
“We will be safer when he’s dead,” she went on. “If you catch a poisonous snake in your bedroom, you don’t let it out in the back yard and hope it won’t come back. That man is a virus, and he’s a virus with a grudge. If we hand him in to the authorities, there’s a chance that he gets out. Even if that’s a faraway eventuality, it’s not a chance we want to take.”
“Give him to Godfrey,” Henry suggested. “Godfrey hates him already, let alone when he finds out he’s working with Cole and the GeoSovs.”
Emma shook her head. “Maybe my head isn’t clear right now but I can’t even contemplate giving him to anyone. If he’s out of our sight, we’re in his sights. Henry, he hates us so much, he kidnapped Tara… for what, to get to me and Dan? He’s just… you can’t think about him like you’d think about anyone else. He’s working with the GeoSovs! I don’t know if he really wants to see the world burn like they do, but he definitely wants to see Slater and Godfrey and all of us burn, and he doesn’t care about collateral damage. He’s given up on life… his grudges are all he has.”
“Clark…” Phil said.
Clark inhaled sharply. “What?”
With an undisguised hand gesture, Phil called him over to the corner of the room. “If it really comes down to… you know, something having to happen…”
“Yeah?”
Phil looked at him intently. “Well if something has to be done it ain’t exactly gonna be one of them, is it? What do you say, rock paper scissors?”
Clark studied Phil’s eyes for a few seconds, trying to figure out whether he was serious. Those eyes had seen a lot, and Phil’s hands had accumulated a lot of dirt over the years. Although he was a fairly warm man to those he knew and liked, Clark had grown up in the knowledge that Phil wasn’t someone whose wrong side he wanted to spend too much time on.
Clearly, he was serious.
“Are you thinking that the winner gets to do this or that the loser has to?” Clark asked.
“Winner’s choice,” Phil replied. “On three, not after three. Okay?”
Out of sight of everyone else, the two men reached a highly uncomfortable decision in a way that would have felt disrespectfully flippant if it didn’t relate to someone they considered on par with a viral infection.
“Rock beats scissors,” Clark said, observantly rather than triumphantly.
Phil shrugged. “Well, I did say winner’s choice…”
“If you wanted to do it, you would have volunteered. And I can’t put this on you, Phil. You already helped out. So if something does have to be handled here, I’ll handle it.”
With a nod, Phil placed his right hand on Clark’s left shoulder, then patted his left hand twice on Clark’s right cheek. “You’re a good man, son. A good man.”
“Here we go, everyone!” Mr Byrd announced. “They’re about to cut to Beijing!”
Everyone gathered around the TV, with Dan finding himself next to Tara. She leaned on him, quite literally, and said nothing as she breathed slowly.
“It’s all going to work out,” he promised. “We’re past the worst of this. You got the worst of it, and you made it through. You’re the strongest person here.”
She looked up at him with a smile. “You always know the right thing to say. Is someone feeding you lines?”
Dan couldn’t help but laugh loudly at this, drawing verbal rebukes from Henry and Clark along with a far-reaching punch in the arm from the latter. “Shut up!” they cried in unison.
Abruptly, the ACN studio feed finally cut to live coverage from the empty square outside of the ELF building in Beijing.
Empty of people, that was.
“Holy shit,” Phil Norris gawped.
No one told him to be quiet, because he had taken the words right out of their mouths.
V minus 19
ELF Headquarters
Beijing, China
The sight was truly surreal as three metallic triangular prisms lay side by side, almost entirely filling the vast public square in front of the ELF’s global headquarters. Two huge cranes were also present, evidently ready to position the smaller triangles inside the largest which had bee
n found first of all on an unassuming beach in Zanzibar.
After around twenty seconds of silence, an ACN newscaster commented that they were receiving a raw feed from China, with all media organisations now banned from a wide exclusion zone around the building. The camera didn’t zoom in close enough to reveal much detail on the triangles’ surfaces, but everyone understood that there would be time for that later. The wide-angle shot framed everything nicely, giving a real sense of scale and spectacle.
“I’ll let these pictures speak for themselves,” the newscaster said, bowing out as a crane carefully lifted the middle-sized triangle with the help of some barely visible and fully removable attachments. This middle triangle fitted perfectly within the indentations on the largest, and its presence had an immediate effect.
Stunningly, the jewel-like markings on the outer triangle began to swirl around like a sea of shooting stars. The camera zoomed in on this, eliciting gasps from everyone in the McCarthys’ living room and doubtless everywhere else, too.
As soon as the middle triangle was in place, the second crane lifted the smallest and prepared to complete the set.
Something was going to happen — that much was clear enough from what had already come to pass — but no one had any idea what that something might be.
“And now what we’ve all been waiting for…” the voiceover announced, punctuating an already tense moment.
At first, the effects of the triangular union were relatively low-key. Following a familiar pattern, the markings on the surface of the middle triangle began to swirl. The camera zoomed in again to capture this moment, which was still remarkable but naturally less breathtaking the second time around.
Then, however, the camera very suddenly zoomed out to its original wide-angle view as a steam-like substance began to emerge from the now-complete three-part object.
Viewers around the world gasped in awe, but this was nothing compared to what came next.
All of a sudden, the middle and inner triangles rose of their own accord, creating a tiered effect that resembled something between a pyramid and a wedding cake.
The ACN newscaster started to pass comment on this remarkable turn of events, but his words were cut off by a reactive and instinctive gasp as an incredibly bright beam of light shot upwards from the centre of the inner triangle. Laser bright and redwood wide, the beam left him lost for words.
Little did he know, the main event was yet to come.
While the man searched for some words to describe what he was seeing, the beam vanished as quickly as it had emerged. In its place, however, something even grander appeared in the sky above Beijing.
It was the single grandest sight anyone had ever seen, in both scale and meaning, and its sheer mass conjured up one word above all others. In this case, craft wouldn’t do. Because for this craft, mothership was surely the only appropriate word.
As the colossal object descended slowly, its shadow grew wider until the whole area around the ELF’s headquarters was cast into darkness.
Workers ran outside for a glimpse of the remarkable mothership, and the remote cameraman pointed directly towards it. Despite the immensity of its shadow the craft was still a great distance from the ground, highlighting just how unprecedented the scale truly was.
“There’s only one thing I can think of to say,” the newscaster commentated, his tone one of wonder rather than fear or anything else negative. “Ladies and gentleman… they’re back.”
V minus 18
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“Guys guys guys!” Dan called, his voice urgent rather than pained. He waved his hand to silence the others then closed his eyes and placed his other hand across them. “They’re talking to me…”
As Tara got to her feet to give Dan some space, Clark and Emma instinctively looked at each other.
“What do you mean it’s not you?” Dan asked, disbelievingly responding out loud to a voice no one else could hear.
The looks around Dan, very suddenly, became grave.
Those looks, however, didn’t come close to the expression of horror that fell upon Dan’s own face a few seconds later.
He dropped his hand and opened his eyes. The words stuck in his mouth rather than his throat, a sudden and total dryness paralysing his tongue.
“What are they telling you, man?” Clark asked. “What did they say?”
Dan turned to Emma. “They’re d-d-different aliens,” he stammered. “Hostile.”
Part 6
The Squadron
“The world is a stage,
but the play is badly cast.”
Oscar Wilde
V minus 17
GCC Headquarters
Buenos Aires, Argentina
As the screen in his office relayed the remarkable sight of a colossal alien mothership hovering over Beijing, William Godfrey nervously picked at his lower lip in a way President Slater had never seen.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, thinking out loud rather than anticipating any informed reply. “Why are they there?”
The office door swung open seconds later. Both knew it could only be Godfrey’s longstanding and well-trusted assistant Manuel — no one else had the access key — so neither were remotely surprised when a familiar voice announced his presence.
“Sir, Madam President, should we call on our member states to be ready for a unified emergency response?”
Slater turned to the beleaguered GCC Chairman. “I’m going to have to do something, William,” she said. “It may as well be unified.”
Godfrey shook his head. “They’re in Beijing, not Buenos Aires, and that can mean one of two things: either they have a message and they’ve chosen to give it to the ELF over not only us but also McCarthy, which I doubt very much, or they’ve finally seen what we see.”
Manuel, fidgeting uneasily in the doorway, shared a glance with President Slater. “Which is…?” he asked.
“That the ELF is a stain on our planet,” Godfrey grunted. “Maybe these triangles were a test and maybe Ding failed by keeping them all for himself like a fat little shit with a birthday cake. And I’ll tell you this, Manuel: if the Messengers are here to deal with our little ELF problem, we’re not rushing to step in.”
V minus 16
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Quite understandably but equally overwhelmingly, everyone gathered tightly around Dan as his expression remained more focused than any they had ever seen before.
“I can’t hear anything else,” he said, straining his closed eyes tighter and tighter in an effort to change that. “They just said it’s not them and that the Squadron aren’t our friends. They’re hostile, but I don’t know who to. Us, the ELF, the Messengers… the connection is gone, like it just stopped working.”
“Did you just say Squadron?” Clark asked. The question was so short and clear, it broke through many more that the others had been throwing at Dan while he strained silently. The depth of Clark’s voice helped, too.
Dan’s eyes opened. He looked straight at Clark and nodded. “Definitely. They said ‘the Squadron’, clear as day.”
“They must know the military connotations of that word,” Clark said, turning to Emma and blowing air from his lips. “But either way, one craft isn’t a squadron.”
“The Squadron,” Dan replied, like this distinction was a lot more important than it sounded. “The way they said it, it seems like the Squadron is the name they use for this race or group or whoever the hell is inside that thing. Just like we call them the Messengers. There aren’t necessarily going to be more ships.”
Phil Norris, standing stoically with his arms folded, offered up a thought that had been uttered by all kinds of people in alien-related discussions since Dan first found Richard Walker’s folder on Winchester Street to kick the whole thing off: “If those things wanted to hurt us, we’d already be dead.”
No one immediately took issue wit
h this, even Dan, but Emma sat down and lifted her phone from her pocket. The point Phil made was such a familiar one, it made her mind wonder what everyone else was saying right now. She opened her Social Media Meta Analysis app and perused data regarding the immediate public reaction.
Words like ‘fear’ and ‘invasion’ dominated the word cloud, but the presence of others like ‘comet’ and ‘helped’ suggested that a lot of users were bearing in mind that the Messengers had a history of benevolence. What they didn’t know, of course, was that the Messengers had just told Dan the mothership wasn’t theirs.
The highlighted top-trending post of the moment was from the actress Kaitlyn Judd: “I’ve seen this movie before, and the aliens who arrive in something looking like that aren’t usually the kind who challenge us to a game of basketball.”
Due to the mixed reactions coming in to the unfolding events in China, the estimated overall mood of related discussion fell within the section of the SMMA spectrum marked ‘apprehensive excitement’. Had the whole world known what those inside the McCarthy family living room knew, Emma imagined the fear levels would be off the charts.
“Maybe we should tell Slater and Godfrey what the Messengers just told you,” Tara suddenly interjected. “Because Dan, if these things are hostile…”
Dan looked at her with a conflicted expression on his face. “I know, but Phil just said it best. They’re here, and they’re not attacking us.”
“Well,” Emma said, looking up from her phone. “They’re not here; they’re in China. There is a chance — just a chance — that they’re either only hostile to the ELF or they’re only going to be friendly with the ELF, which could make them hostile to us. And I wasn’t in your head when you heard the words, but for the Messengers to use a term like ‘the Squadron’… that makes me think these things might at least be the same kind of aliens, you know? Race, species, whatever you’d call it. Maybe… I dunno, a different faction? If their Elders are dead or still just unresponsive, there could be a power vacuum on New Kerguelen.”
The Final Call Page 29
