The soldier stepped forward.
“It’s true, sirs, all of it,” he said. “I am Lieutenant… Major Dangral. I led the raid on the humans’ enclave. Everything the general says is true.”
Honorius spoke. “Can we examine the site of this human settlement?”
“I-I…” Dangral stammered. “That is to say—”
Ursus cut him off. “The caverns were fault-ridden—our attack on them caused a collapse. Any evidence, other than these tools, was buried within.”
“I see,” the president said, but Zaius demanded more.
“Preposterous,” he scoffed. “Who is this ‘enemy from the Forbidden Zone’? What proof is there that unknown forces are aiding the humans? Have you seen these enigmas?”
“No, Doctor, I have not,” Ursus replied. “However, as this court knows, we have sent scouts into the region, and all have disappeared… or gone mad.” He turned on the doctor. “Either apes supplied those tools, and instructed the humans in their use, or…” He let that sink in. “Or the humans are smarter than we think—and are learning how to make and use these things on their own.”
The chamber was dead silent.
Ursus spoke quickly now.
“Ridiculous, I know. The only rational answer is that there is an unknown enemy in the Forbidden Zone, training the humans and using them as attack beasts.
“Our crops have been ravaged. If we cannot replenish our food supplies, we may not survive until next harvest. If our enemy is able to survive out there, there must be habitable lands within or beyond the Forbidden Zone. We must strike and take those lands before we starve to death.”
Ursus moved with purpose. “Give me the emergency powers I need to make things right.” An assistant sitting in the corner rushed forward, producing a familiar scroll. “This is the Ape City Security and Defense Declaration.” All eyes turned to President Gaius. When the president remained stoic, Ursus spoke for him. “It’s clear that this is too important to be settled by the court alone. Instead, I suggest that we take it to the common ape.”
Dr. Maximus chimed in. “Yes, let’s call a session of the Citizens’ Council. Let the majority decide our course of action.”
“Yes,” Dr. Arlus agreed. “Let’s put it to a citizens’ vote.”
“So be it.” President Gaius sighed, and he was clearly relieved. “Doctors Cornelius and Zira are hereby acquitted of the crimes of heresy and malicious mischief. Dr. Zaius’s recommendations in regards to the two chimpanzee scientists are to be implemented.” He paused to take a breath. “Citizens’ Council is to meet and hear General Ursus’s proposal tomorrow at noon.”
Gaius slammed his gavel hard. “Meeting adjourned.”
As the assembly dispersed, Ursus vied for Zaius’s attention.
“Doctor, in the interest of fairness, I would ask that both you and Reverend Sabian sit in attendance with me at the Citizens’ Council meeting.” Zaius raised a brow. “So that the community may hear from science, religion, and their military commander.” Zaius nodded. Ursus bowed, replaced his helmet and made for the exit, confident in his stride.
* * *
Zaius left the chambers with a heavy heart. When he was clear of the other council members, Cornelius and Zira pounced upon him like humans begging for food.
“Now that you have been exonerated, and the court has granted you membership in the Citizens’ Council, we have much to do,” he said. “Zira, you go to Maximus first thing tomorrow morning.” He turned from the psychologist to the archeologist.
“Cornelius, report to me then in my office,” he continued.
“Dr. Zaius—” Zira started. Cornelius put a hand up to stop her.
“We don’t want to sound ungrateful, Doctor,” Cornelius said, “but why are we doing this?”
“Because these are dangerous times,” Zaius replied, “more dangerous than any heresy charge.” He thought of old Zao, and the fate to which he had condemned his mentor. About his gorilla aide, Marcus, and how the now late Secret Security chief had kept Ursus’s power separate from the city guard. And he thought of Zira’s nephew, Lucius—the young ape who had given his life to save him.
Zaius feared what Ursus was capable of doing. The general had the encounter at the human caves to justify his cause. Through Sabian he had the backing of the Church, and now he held Gaius’s ear. The Citizens’ Council wouldn’t be far behind.
“My support in the High Council is not what it used to be,” Zaius explained. “I have given you clemency in exchange for your loyalty, and secrecy regarding the… other matter. Together, we must make certain that Ape City does not unravel.”
* * *
Zaius’s demeanor made it clear that there would be no further discussion—at least not until the morrow—so Cornelius and Zira turned to leave. They had reached the marketplace when a voice rang out.
“Dr. Zira!”
It was Jaila, a nurse with whom Zira had worked before—the personal assistant of the now late Dr. Galen. She had Galen’s widow—Liet—with her. Reluctant to be stopped, however, Cornelius tugged at his wife’s hand and pulled her away with him.
“I’m sorry—we must be going,” Zira said, then she averted her eyes and followed her husband. The two female chimpanzees fell in behind them. As the newlyweds sped up, the new arrivals matched their pace.
“Doctor, we would have a word with you,” Liet said.
“It’s important,” Jaila insisted.
It was Cornelius who turned on them.
“Now, see here,” he whispered through gritted teeth, his eyes darting this way and that to see who was watching. Luckily for them, the market was crowded with apes intent on their own business—no one seemed to notice them. “We were just acquitted of heresy charges that linked us to the experiments conducted by your late husband,” he said to Liet, “and your superior,” he nodded at Jaila. “We cannot be seen talking to either of you.”
Galen had been exposed for performing bizarre surgical experimentation on humans, and while the doctor was dead, there still were rumors that he and Zira had performed the surgery that gave Taylor the ability to talk.
“So, ladies, if you don’t mind”—Cornelius nodded to each in turn—“it was, uh, lovely running into you.” He wriggled his nose in defiance. “Good day.”
Impressed with his bravado, Zira smiled with her eyes and squeezed his hand. As the couple resumed their course, the two female chimps did not follow. Instead, Liet waited until they were a good ten feet away before blurting out a name.
“Landon!”
Zira came to a full stop, yanking her husband to a halt beside her. Cornelius closed his eyes and sighed. Opening them slowly, he turned to his wife. Her expression told him everything he didn’t want to know.
“No,” he said to her.
Zira turned back to Liet and Jaila.
“It’s about Bright Eyes’ friend,” Jaila quietly affirmed.
“We have him,” Liet added, “and we need your help.”
CHAPTER 9
THE BROKEN BOUGH
Korea
1953
The meteor seared a swath through the forest. Its spearhead plowed a trench deep into the snow-covered ground, finally coming to rest when it had all but buried itself in the forest floor.
Given the all-clear, Captain Lazenbe’s squadron touched down on a makeshift airfield not far from the impact site. U.S. forces canvassed the area, making certain it was secure. With only a skeleton force at the new airfield, Lieutenant George Taylor and Airman First Class Donovan Maddox decided to have a look-see themselves.
Taylor needed to know what had fallen out of the sky. It had disintegrated the enemy fighters, and taken out two of his own as well—and then it had changed course.
Deftly they slipped away, following the smoke trail for nearly two miles. Moving silently past several sentries, Taylor noted that they wore no U.S. insignia, nor were they dressed in any official uniforms—at least none that Taylor recognized.
* * *
The two pilots approached the buried meteor, only to discover that it wasn’t a meteor at all. It was surrounded by more troops, these dressed entirely in black. They almost didn’t spot the troops until it was too late.
Someone built that thing, Taylor mused. It looks like a plane—but different. More advanced. Like something out of science fiction.
Maddox’s eyes were wide with fear. His tongue lashed across dry lips. He gave voice to what Taylor was thinking.
“It’s a UFO, boss.”
“You don’t know that.” Taylor waved him off. Still a kid, Maddox had read too many comic books about invaders from space. But he refused to give up, and stabbed a finger at the strange craft.
“You’re gonna tell me that we built that?”
The likely answer was no. Maddox continued, motioning toward the black-dressed troops.
“And just who are these jokers?”
“Reds maybe?” Taylor offered. This close to the Soviet Union, the idea couldn’t be ignored. Yet it didn’t seem right, either. He focused his attention on the dart-shaped craft, and he thought he could make out a number on its side—the partial remains of a “9.”
What the hell is that thing?
Then things went fubar.
“Hold up!” someone shouted crisply. “Airmen, what are you doing here?” The black-fatigued soldier’s firearm was trained on them. “What’s your clearance?” He didn’t lower the weapon, even though he could tell whose side they were on.
Definitely not Reds, Taylor surmised. The soldier had too much of a Texan twang about him. Challenged, the ace pilot stepped forward, anger building inside of him.
“My clearance? It’s right here.” As he feigned reaching for something in his back pocket, Taylor swung at the soldier, his fist bashing the man’s face. Immediately, several of the black-jacketed goons emerged from the shadows, and they grabbed for him.
“Not me!” His hands up, Maddox did nothing—simply muttered over and over, “Not me!”
“Shut up,” Taylor barked at his wingman. Hands grappled with him and locked him in an iron grip.
“What the hell is this?” One of the men in black, wearing a flak vest, stepped forward. Taylor glared at him antagonistically as his hands were cuffed behind his back.
“That thing almost killed me up there, and took out part of my squadron,” he challenged. “Whatever it is, I have every right to see it.” Maddox raised his arms over his head. Taylor pinned the newcomer with his gaze.
The man held firm. “Name, rank, and service number, airman.” He sounded… annoyed. “Now.”
Taylor set his jaw.
“I should ask you the same.” He scanned the man and didn’t bother to conceal his contempt. “You’re not Army, Navy, or Army Air Force.” Taylor squinted at the man. “Just who in the hell are you?”
Without answering, the man yanked open Taylor’s bomber jacket and pulled the lieutenant’s dog tags from his neck, holding them up to read them. His eyes widening, he read the name aloud.
“Taylor, George, Lieutenant.”
He glared at Taylor, looking for weakness. Taylor showed none, so the man addressed the soldiers surrounding the two pilots.
“Put these yahoos on the next plane to the Boxer.” He nodded his men off. “The admiral will want to see them personally.”
Boxer.
CV-21.
U.S. aircraft carrier.
Taylor smiled, his crooked fangs bared in defiance. They were U.S. after all. He knew what a trip to “the admiral” would entail—he’d been there before. He wasn’t worried.
Before he and the distraught Maddox were pushed away from the scene, two figures in white hazard suits emerged from the craft’s open side hatch. They carried a stretcher. On it was a body covered with a stained white sheet. The shrouded corpse seemed almost human, but there was something off about it. The proportions were queer, the face misshapen under the veil.
As the men stumbled with the weight, an arm flopped out from under the cover, garbed in what looked like a padded pressure suit. The hand was badly singed, and its proportions were wrong. Five fingers, and they were longer than those of any man Taylor had ever seen.
With a shove he and Maddox were led away. Taylor craned his neck to see behind him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the arrow-headed capsule.
What the hell is going on?
* * *
Now
Taylor was falling. The phantom rock face that blocked their path had been another one of those bizarre illusions. Unlike desert mirages, which tended to evaporate, this specter had been up close and real.
Separated from Nova, he cleaved through the incorporeal cliff and tumbled headfirst into a bottomless void. An ever-narrowing sinkhole gobbled him up whole, until Taylor slid through the neck of the hourglass, falling unceremoniously into a grainy ocean of sepia.
There was no sky. As there were sands below, there were sands above.
Yet he wasn’t underground. The desert raged above him. A dust devil blotted out the sun, threatening to cascade a torrent of timeless grit. It scratched his throat, scoured his skin, and stung his eyes. Its whine deafened him.
This was worse than the Forbidden Zone.
This was hell.
* * *
Bloodshot eyes bloated and nose dripping, Cornelius’s hay fever was a living hell. The country simply wasn’t the place for him.
After their meeting in the marketplace, Jaila and Liet had whisked them away to an oper farm and orchard in the provinces—a land of blossoming flowers and fruit and beauty. It reminded him why he had chosen to dig around in the dry desert of the Forbidden Zone.
The pollen count is much lower when the terrain around you is dead.
Belonging to another activist named Consus, the farm had been made their base of operations far from the prying eyes of Ape City. Standing in a wine cellar beneath the barn, Cornelius tried to clear his sinuses as Zira examined the human who had fallen from the sky with Taylor—the human called Landon.
It had been Landon, Jaila explained, who had killed Dr. Galen and Chief Marcus on the Ape City bridge. Landon’s brain had been surgically altered by Zaius’s surgeons, allegedly to save him from a head wound he had suffered during the hunt. Taylor had known better, though—Zaius had lobotomized the human to keep him from speaking.
Then when Zaius and his police force had headed into the Forbidden Zone in pursuit of Taylor, General Ursus had begun organizing practice drills in which the army used humans as live targets. It was then that the Anti-Vivisection Society—which Liet now led—had freed as many of them as they could. Landon was amongst them.
His wound was infected.
As he had before, the human sat up on the makeshift examination table, hopping off on unsteady footing and wandering around the cellar. Cornelius noticed that he always returned to the same locations within the confined space, reaching to pluck the same nothings out of the air or press his fingers—always in the same sequence—on the same nearby shelves and tables. After his ritual was complete, he returned to the examination table, lay down, made some kind of sign across his chest, and went to sleep.
“Extraordinary,” Zira reflected.
“Hardly,” Liet sighed. “It does it all day long, every day.”
“What is it doing, Doctor?” Jaila asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” Zira responded, “but it appears to be a behavior he must have performed with purpose, numerous times before he was traumatized. Likely he trained to do it so well that he could do it in his sleep.”
From the doorway, Cornelius sneezed. “Maybe he thinks he’s on his flying machine, and he’s trying to leave the planet.” He blew his nose before adding, “If I were him, I know I would.”
“Flying machine?” Jaila said.
“It’s a long story.” Cornelius exhaled.
“My cousin Milo says flying machines are possible,” Liet commented, “at least in theory. You know him, Dr. Cornelius. H
e often spoke of you.”
Milo the tinkerer, Cornelius remembered. Milo the engineer.
“Yes…” he said, but he let it go at that. As far as he was concerned, flight was a scientific impossibility—despite Taylor’s claims. But for Milo, it had been a nut the engineer had been trying to crack since his academy days.
Liet indicated Landon.
“Milo spoke to it,” she said, “when it was kept in my husband’s lab.” When they didn’t respond, she added, “I don’t know about what. Now Milo has gone into the Forbidden Zone on some sort of expedition—perhaps in search of the machine you describe.”
Cornelius nodded—that made a certain amount of sense. Taylor had told them it had crashed and sunk in the Dead Lake. He looked to his wife, but her gaze was fixed on Landon, watching his every move. Without taking her eyes off of him, she reached into her chest pocket and produced a pencil and a pad.
“I’ll need Jaila’s assistance,” she said. “Also a measuring stick, and complete silence.”
Cornelius knew better than to question his wife when she used that tone. As Zira began to make exacting records of Landon’s movements, he placed the stick on the table next to her, pecked her on the cheek, and ushered Liet out of the cellar.
* * *
Hours passed, and then Zira’s records were complete.
As Cornelius readied the wagon, she promised Jaila and Liet she would return with antibiotics for Landon’s infected wounds. Waiting for her husband, she regarded Liet. A socialite given to fads, in the past Liet’s loyalties had seemed as fickle as the weather. When owning a human-skin pelt was all the rage, she had insisted that Galen buy one for each room. When the social elite decided that cruelty to animals was unacceptable, she threw the skins away and donated money to the Anti-Vivisection Society.
Now Zira was stunned to discover that during the time she and Cornelius had spent in the Forbidden Zone, Liet had been made the league’s leader. It seemed beyond credibility.
“Why, Liet?” she asked. “What are you doing this for?”
Liet smiled. “I used to think humans were stupid, disgusting creatures—that all they cared about was mating and food. That changed when I saw that a human—Landon—could speak.” She nodded toward the barn. “The night it killed my husband, it kidnapped me and tried to use me to find its friends.” She shuddered. “It was savage and threatened to kill me—but it was smart.”
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