"I could touch the moon with a stone skipped on the sea." She smiled. "Your stolen thunder is no match for me." Grimacing through his thin lips, the shaman pulled out a pistol, but there was no time. Ross' shots hit him three times in the chest, and he dropped forward, his robe bursting into flame. Mackey and Tikhonov ducked as an explosion went off a bit too close. The Megatherium was wounded by the bomb blast, sending it crawling back into the smoke.
The mustached scientist shrugged his tweed shoulders, pushing a cloud of cigar exhaust into the surrounding mist. "Sorry."
Over the noise of automatic weapons fire, they heard the zinging crack of Hopper's transistor staff once, and then twice. Purple light crackled, diffused by the smoke.
Three shamans appeared out of the smoke. Two held pistols, and the third's staff bristled with purple light. "Fred," Parsons spoke slowly, "run."
Ross whipped up her opposite gun, turning it to an awkward 90-degree angle. She released a burst of rounds into the nearest shaman. Knocked backward by the force of the bullets, but before he could fall to the ground, his chest exploded in a sparking nebula of blood and bone, as the secondary charges on the rounds sent them out of his torso and into the body of the shaman next to him, taking them both down to the sandy floor of the cave. While the third shaman turned towards her, Parsons lept forward, pulling up the Wizard's Hat, connecting with the underside of the shaman's jaw. "Now!" he yelled at Mackey. Bullets whistled out of the smoke, impacting on the rocks behind them. Tikhonov grabbed Mackey's arm, and they dodged away, into the gloom.
They moved quickly and quietly around the stacks of material and equipment in the cavern. "What do you think we're looking for?" Tikhonov whispered.
"Not sure," Mackey responded. "A room large enough for computer and radio equipment. Chairs for technicians, consoles to operate the gear."
A thundering sound was approaching, and they dodged behind a stack of crates just in time, before a wounded Megatherium crashed past, apparently not seeing them in the thin remains of the fog. The smoke was clearing now as they got further away from the height of the battle. The sound of explosions and automatic fire still echoed across the cavernous area.
"Look." Tikhonov pointed. Ahead, a tunnel cut into the rock, and two shamans stood guarding the passage. "Seems likely, no?" Mackey gripped his dazzle pistol. "We have to take them out, after we blind them," Tikhonov whispered. "Otherwise they will chase us. Do like you did back in the Sierras. Shoulder to solar plexus. That'll knock his wind out."
"Ready," Mackey said. "Three, two, one—"
They leapt out, hitting a full run, side by side. The shamans saw them coming and began reaching for weapons. Tikhonov and Mackey fired at the same time, delivering a green wave of light. The shamans grabbed for their eyes, screaming. The blaze was so bright it rebounded off the luminescent cave walls, causing Mackey to briefly see spots. But he was already leaning into his shoulder, ready to deliver his entire weight to the man's chest. Dizzy though he was, his aim was true. The shaman crumbled backward, smashing into the rock with his head.
Tikhonov had also hit his man, square on. "Get their pistols," he said to Mackey. "And whatever that staff is, throw it away. I don't know what it is, but I don't trust the stuff." Mackey kicked the staffs out into the gloom, and handed the pistol that had been knocked to the ground to Tikhonov.
"Are you sure?" Tikhonov's dark eyes looked questioningly.
"I think it is better off in your hands than mine," Mackey reassured him.
Tikhonov nodded. "Very well. Then you take this." He handed his dazzle pistol to Mackey, giving him two fists of laser light to strike out with. "Quickly, before someone sees us." They dashed into the corridor.
It wasn't long before they found it. This underground site was for a particular purpose, and that purpose was clearly the central hub of the cave system, though it seemed they were now impossibly deep within the mountain. The two men stayed hidden behind the door frame in the dark tunnel as they sized up the situation. The control room was a gigantic dome shape, hollowed from the solid rock of the volcano. Far larger than Mackey had suspected, a hundred yards across, the room was built in a semi-circle around a giant projection screen on the wall, showing a map of the planet overlaid with wave-form orbit tracks. The room was also crowded with personnel, nearly twenty technicians, each busy at their station, focused on operating the computers and other paraphernalia. Around the far side of the room stood a squad of the elite Smithsonian Guard, well armed from what Mackey and Tikhonov could see. Many other passages led out of the control room in all directions, to points unknown within the mountain.
"More computers." Tikhonov sighed. "How do we get you on a machine with all of these people in there, not to mention the Smithsonian Guard?"
"I have no idea," Mackey said, nervously. Then he heard rapid footsteps coming up the hallway behind them. He wheeled around with the dazzle pistols ready, only to find Parsons there, covered in dirt, his plaid jacket burned on both sleeves. He waved wildly, a brilliant smile around the cigar in his mouth. Mackey motioned for quiet. Ross followed him, then Hopper, and then a small group of Postal Inspectors.
"Are these all of our people that are left?" Tikhonov whispered.
Hopper signaled no, and leaned close to the group. "The rest are back guarding the remains of the shaman squad, and forming a defensive position in case the sloths return."
"Where did they go?" Mackey asked, worried.
Hopper shrugged. "The last of the herd took off down a side tunnel. Who knows to where, or why."
"Those fools in the hoods are from the Indian Affairs Service, I have no doubt," Parsons whispered. "They always leaned towards wholesale appropriation. Communication with animals, on the other hand, is more of a Fish and Wildlife Service thing. I'm guessing the shamans were using that technology somehow, putting the fear and rage into them. When we broke up the bigoted parlor games, they probably lost control of them, and they scattered according to their natural senses again." He turned to Ross. "How about those wannabe medicine men, eh Mary? You sure were dropping them left and right!"
Ross shrugged him off. "What goes around comes around, as we say in orbital mechanics. But what sort of animals were those?"
"The namesake of our friends, the Megatherium Club," Hopper said quietly. "An extinct species of megafauna last alive during the late Pleistocene. Where they got them from, I haven't a clue. But that's what they were, sure enough."
Tikhonov gestured at the control room. "Sloths aside, what do we do now? Too many in there to take all at once!"
Hopper checked her watch, and motioned to one of the Inspectors, who approached, carrying a small telephone set attached to a reel of very fine wire that he was spooling out behind them.
"The High Virgo should impact in just a few minutes. That should take the station out of action. We'll confirm, and then call for reinforcements." The Assistant Secretary took a headset from the Inspector and put it on. "Radios won't work underground, but this line runs back to a mobile surface antenna."
She listened to the words coming over the air. "Ninety seconds until detonation," she whispered.
"Why is it called High Virgo?" Mackey asked. "It's just an anti-satellite missile, right? No occult functionality?"
Parsons shrugged. "You tell me, Fred. Some of our equipment just has funny names. Maybe whomever signed off on it happened to be a Virgo. Or loved a Virgo, maybe."
"Thirty seconds!"
They crouched in the tunnel, watching the scene in the room intently. Mackey tried to make out what the various screens might indicate. A lot of telemetry data, to be sure, but for what? Other than the course of what must be the eavesdropping satellite, marked with a white sine wave upon the map of the earth, he couldn't identify anything.
"Detonation!"
They all braced for impact, but of course, there was none. A five megaton warhead detonated h
undreds of miles beyond the thick earth atmosphere. Gamma rays from the fusion blast impacted with stray atoms in the upper atmosphere, causing a tsunami of free electrons speeding through space. The electric fields from these accelerating particles reverberated through the circuits of anything nearby, generating a surplus current in any standing wire, frying transistors, microcircuits, and motors in the fusion's electromagnetic surge.
All that they saw below in the ground station was one column of telemetry cease scrolling across the screen. The small circle placed upon the sine wave of the orbit line disappeared. Technicians began furiously punching at the screen.
"That's it." Mackey smiled. "Got it."
Hopper held her earpiece, listening carefully. Tikhonov nudged Mackey. "Are you sure? Are you sure it's completely gone?"
Mackey looked at the staff of the ground station running frantically about, checking machines for any sort of fault or error. He imagined that the realization would be immediate, but certainty would be slow in dawning. They would be checking every other conceivable failure, looking for bad connections, faulty terminals, or logged errors. Even though they already knew what the problem really was. They would want to replace every wire and cable in the system, one by one, before they admitted that their satellite was suddenly gone.
But they weren't doing that. They were sitting back down. Commands were being given, and a new sine wave had appeared on the screen. What were they doing?
Ross pointed. "It's another satellite, isn't it? They have a backup."
Telemetry data had started running across the screen again. The curve of the sine wave was shifting. "They're running a burn," Parsons said. "They have another functional satellite in orbit, and they are burning fuel to change the orbit and bring it into position."
"Another eavesdropping satellite?" Tikhonov asked. "So they can still run the jamming program? Can we hit it again?"
Hopper was conversing rapidly with whomever was on the other end of the long wire. She removed one earphone from the headset. "It's no good, there's no time to prepare another High Virgo shot. And even if we got it, they might have a third satellite. We have to take the command room—now."
She turned, exchanging furious hand signals with the Inspectors, one of whom started running back up the tunnel. "We'll get reinforcements, and then we'll try and make a—" She was interrupted by a loud, primordial roar.
"Oh no." Parsons sighed.
"Which direction, which direction?" Ross spoke quickly.
"I don't know, there were too many echoes!"
The technicians in the control room heard it as well, looking around, trying to get some sort of a sense of what the sound was and where it was coming from. And then it sounded again, louder, like a deep brass trumpet, filled with rage.
The Megatherium stormed out of one of the side tunnels into the control room. Next to the computer terminals, it looked even more gigantic, three times the height of a human, perhaps the biggest of the lot. Blood streamed down its legs from a large wound on its side. And as it reared up onto hind legs, tongue wagging out, eyes bulging, it sprayed blood from its mouth across the room as it let out once more its furious cry. With one wheel of its claws, an entire computer cabinet was crushed into scrap metal, launching streamers of magnetic tape across the room.
"As soon as they open fire," Hopper said, "go!"
It took mere seconds for the Smithsonian Guard to get their wits about them and their guns in hand. The technicians ran out into the tunnels in a panic, the last of them getting clear just as soon as the automatic fire rang out like tearing canvas, echoing in the dome-shaped chamber.
"Take out the Guards!" Hopper yelled. "Leave the animal to me! And make sure you don't destroy the equipment!"
Parsons ran right, and Tikhonov followed. Hopper dodged left, with Mackey after her. Ross took one step into the room and reloaded her weapon. She raised the gun to her shoulder, sighted towards the ceiling, and punched in her timing on the keypad. She let loose shots in a wide arc, up across the top of the dome, rotating the barrel of the weapon as she panned across. She painted a wide rainbow of tracer and secondary charge sparks as she did so, raining down bullets onto the heads of the Smithsonian Guard. She felled all but two.
One of the remaining Guards was hit by Tikhonov as he cut across the room from the right, firing with a pistol. It was a good shot, just over the rows of monitors and consoles, dropping the Guard to the control room floor. "The equipment! Mind the equipment!" Hopper screamed.
Seeing Tikhonov's motion, the giant sloth lumbered towards him, crushing desk chairs and tables. Hopper tried to get its attention, but could not. Instead, she was confronted with the last of the Smithsonian Guard, raising his gun. "Look out!" Mackey screamed from behind her, uselessly. He fired his dazzle pistol, but the green light was absorbed by a computer cabinet between himself and the Guard.
Hopper stopped, pointed her staff at the Guard, and sank to her knee, touching the point to the concrete floor. The zing-crack of the transistor staff rebounded off the walls of the control room like a thunderbolt. When Mackey peered around the computer cabinet, he saw a crack emanating from where Hopper stood, through the concrete, and up into the wall beyond. On one side of the rift was the body of the Smithsonian Guard. On the other side was his right leg and right arm, still clutching his weapon. His blood ran into the massive crack opened up in the concrete, down into the mountain below.
Mackey gaped in shock. "What is that thing?"
"It's a type of ultrasonic knife," she said. "But no time for an engineering lesson now, we must help Parsons."
Across the room, Parsons was cornered by the Megatherium. He dropped his cigar and, without looking, quietly rubbed it out with his foot. He had put down the Wizard's Hat and had both arms extended, palms down. The creature was up on its hind legs, long claws swiping left and right, closer and closer to the rocket scientist.
"Jack!" yelled Ross from across the room, switching magazines. "When I fire, run!"
"No, no!" he responded calmly. "Don't shoot."
He closed his eyes, raising his palms so that they faced the giant sloth, elbows at right angles. The behemoth roared, spitting blood and hot, steamy breath all over Parsons, blowing his hair back. The smell of the wounded beast was thick in the room, like compost in a summer heat. Parsons did not move.
Hopper moved forward, to get an angle on the creature that would not catch Parsons in the crossfire. Mackey followed along, more for wanting to stay near to Hopper than any constructive plan, but he held the dazzle pistols ready, meaning to give the Megatherium a double blast to the eyes if it turned their way.
The sloth dropped to all fours and began licking its claws. It bellowed, a sound like the foghorn of a cargo ship, echoing off the walls of the room.
"What is happening?" whispered Mackey.
Then the Megatherium lumbered off to the left, past Parsons, and out one of the side tunnels, trailing blood and smacking a desk chair across the room with its giant, fur-covered tail. They all converged upon Parsons.
"What the hell were you doing?" Ross demanded.
"I was feeling its pain." Parsons sniffed, wiping away a tear. "I took its wounds into me, so that it might be relieved. Poor thing. Out of its time. It's meant to roam a jungle the likes of which we no longer know. It is a vegetarian. It loves banana leaves and yucca, and would eat avocados the way we eat blueberries."
Mackey looked at Tikhonov, who looked at Ross, who looked at Hopper, who rubbed her eyes. "Well, that's lovely. Now, what's happening here?" She gestured at the screen, and they moved to the computer terminals as the Inspector reinforcements from up the tunnel arrived, securing the entrances and exits.
"We could try and disable the information transfer between the satellite and the ELF transmitter," Mackey suggested. "But we have no idea how that is done, or where those control programs are running. It would probab
ly be easier to seize control over the satellite directly."
Ross was examining the screens of the various stations, wiping away sloth blood to see what was displayed.
"This one, here," Parsons said, still wiping away tears.
"How do you know?" asked Mackey.
Parsons pointed to a sign mounted above the terminal, reading GUIDO. "Guidance Officer," he said, deadpan.
Ross came over and sat in the chair. All the screens were dark. There was an arc of bullet holes across the face of the console. "Well that's just great," she said. "The Smithsonian Guard must have got it."
"Look for GNC," Parsons said. "Guidance, Navigation, and Control. We should be able to fire the guidance rockets manually, and if we're lucky, put it enough out of orbit that it can't function correctly."
Tikhonov found it, one row back. "It appears to be functional!" he called.
Ross quickly took a seat, letting her guns retract on their slings, a smoking pair of fully-automatic wings. Mackey found some paper and tried to wipe as much of the sloth blood off the console as he could.
"Good, good—" Ross said, entering some commands. "This isn't too unfamiliar. Looks like they borrowed most of their system tech from ASTB."
Her fingers flew over the keyboard, and the screens printed out lists of data. "Goodness, there's a lot of satellites under control here. I don't know which one we want."
Mackey read various numbers off the big screen, where the trajectory of one satellite was plotted. "Any of those correspond?"
"Nothing."
Parsons began clearing a place on the floor. "We'll locate it," he said as he emptied an inbox from a desk and placed it on the ground, "the old-fashioned way." He took some of the sloth blood from a computer terminal onto his hand and began drawing a large circle on the concrete with the thick red liquid, smearing it like paint.
"What are you doing, Jack?" Ross looked down at him.
"No time to argue, Mary. Come sit in the circle."
Orthogonal Procedures Page 25
