by Chris Fox
The second figure was familiar: Doctor Roberts.
Jordan released the blur. “Hello, Doctor Roberts. I’m sorry about the window.”
“Jordan,” Roberts roared, shooting to his feet. “How dare you barge in like this, unannounced? Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Me?” Jordan asked. He set Leti down.
She blinked at her surroundings, clearly shocked at her sudden change in location. To her, no time had passed and they were still at the gate.
“I’m your neighbor,” Jordan said. “Lord of the Ark of the Mother.”
“You? She chose you?” Roberts asked. He seemed to deflate, sinking back into his chair. After a moment he composed himself, turning to the other figures at the table. “Leave us. Jordan and I need to talk. Alone.”
Jordan nodded at Leti. “She stays.”
“Fine,” Roberts snapped. “Everyone else, out.”
The other figures rose, filing reluctantly out the door. Their faces were filled with curiosity, and he couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t every day an Ark Lord came crashing into your board meeting, or whatever they’d been about.
Roberts waited until the door closed before speaking. He turned to Jordan, scratching at his ever-present beard. It was just as wild as the last time Jordan had seen him. “You can control the Ark?”
“Yeah. How I ended up with the key is a long story, but the short version is I’m the Ark Lord.” Jordan kept his tone light. He didn’t want Roberts to think he was being insincere. “From the little Leti has told me, you’re surrounded by enemies. Seems like you might be in need of a little help.”
“She’s right about that, and she doesn’t know the worst of it.” Roberts turned to Leti, giving her a respectful nod. “No offense meant, Leti. There are just things I haven’t been able to tell you.”
“I take no offense, El Medico,” she replied, giving a graceful bow.
She sat in one of the recently vacated chairs, so Jordan did the same.
A figure appeared on the window sill, the muzzle of his machine gun raised in Jordan’s direction. Jordan blurred to the right, dodging a stream of bullets as they punched into the chair he’d been sitting in. He had enough time to identify Javier, then Roberts blurred in between them.
El Medico seized the gun, yanking it from Javier’s grasp. “Stand down, Javier. Now.”
Robert’s authority was absolute. Javier relaxed, but his gaze was fixed on Jordan. There was hatred there. Jordan really needed to work on his people skills.
“Jordan is my guest now.” Roberts patted Javier on the shoulder. “You’ve done well Javier. Thank you.”
“As you wish, El Medico. I will head back to my post.” Javier glared daggers at Jordan. Then he turned without another word, leaping back down into the courtyard.
“Dammit, Jordan,” Roberts said, “you make trouble wherever you go. You’re like a tornado.” He gave a heavy sigh, returning to his seat. “I hope you understand the intensity of my dislike for you. Every last time I’ve run into you, my life has gotten more complicated, and I have a feeling this is no exception. Unfortunately, you’re right. I need you. Why don’t I bring you up to speed on what we’re doing here, and you can fill me in on what you’ve been doing the last five years.”
“Sounds fair.” Jordan nodded. “You want to start, or shall I?”
“I don’t have time to care where you’ve been, to be honest. Let’s start with my problems, and then we’ll get to how you can help me with them,” Roberts said. He eyed Jordan coldly, but at least the animosity was familiar. “Those problems are twofold. First, the deathless have been consolidating power on this continent. Every day, their empire gets closer to us on both the northern and southern border. We’re surrounded.”
“I thought that this continent had the highest concentration of werewolves in the world,” Jordan pointed out.
“It does, but we’re still drastically outnumbered. There are hundreds of millions of deathless across the continent, and only a few thousand werewolves. Most of those werewolves struck off on their own to carve out tribes. Only a few hundred stayed in New Peru. We’re surrounded and outnumbered.”
“What about the Amazon?” Jordan asked. “Doesn’t the jungle protect your flank?”
“It does, to a degree. The Amazon is controlled by Leti’s people, but that’s not as much a blessing as you might think. They’re religious zealots with their own carefully cobbled-together dogma.” Robert’s contempt for the order surprised Jordan. “Still, they’re allies, of a sort. I allow them to occupy the Ark, and they leave us alone. If we’re invaded, I’m fairly confident they’ll send at least some help. I don’t think it will be nearly enough, though.”
“Okay, that’s a grim tactical situation. What’s the second problem?” Jordan asked. He wanted to know the entirety of what he was doing with before he started analyzing the problems.
“Sobek. You’ve heard of him?” Roberts asked. He waved a hand, and a muffin floated off a tray and over to his hand. Jordan watched the signal carefully. This one he knew intimately, and he was confident that his command of telekinesis was greater than Roberts’s, even without the Ark.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Neither Isis nor Osiris had anything good to say about him. How is he an issue?”
“About a year after Isis left to help you in your latest war, a ship showed up in port,” Roberts explained. “It had a cargo of black stone cut from Easter Island. Sobek claimed he’d made a deal with Isis, and that he’d deliver a shipment annually for the next decade.” He paused to tear a piece from the muffin, tossing it in his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Do you remember why you recruited me for that initial dig, Jordan?”
“Of course,” Jordan said, a little more forcefully than he’d intended. “You’re a geologist—one of the finest in the world before it ended. Now? The leading expert, without a doubt.”
“I examined this stone and learned a great deal about the properties that made it so valuable in the previous age. Here, look at this.” Roberts withdrew a smooth black stone from his pocket and tossed it to Jordan.
Jordan plucked it from the air effortlessly. “What am I looking at?” He held the stone up to his face, studying it. It was warm to the touch, and he could sense faint energy inside of it.
“This stone is unique, so far as I can tell,” Roberts said. “It’s a type of volcanic rock, which turns out to be one of the best materials for containing the energy we utilize for our abilities. The same energy that we get from the moon, or that the deathless get from the sun. The rock makes an excellent storage mechanism for that energy. It’s slow to charge, but will hold that charge indefinitely. In the case of Easter Island, it’s been building that energy for hundreds of thousands of years—maybe millions. Since it was out in the middle of the ocean, there was no one like us around to tap into it.”
“So you’re saying that this stone is a battery, basically?” Jordan asked. That seemed the relevant takeaway.
“Essentially. A battery that we can build functionality into, using shaping.”
“Like the obelisks surrounding the perimeter,” Jordan said, snapping his fingers. “They’re sensors, aren’t they?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised that you figured out the technology so quickly, given your background with Mohn. Yes, the obelisks are my invention. They detect certain wavelengths, such as the kind we use when shaping. That’s not their only use, of course. They are also weapons—weapons we have not yet had to test.”
“So Sobek is dropping off this stone. That’s a good thing, right?”
“It was at first,” Roberts allowed. “The problem is that he’s growing suspicious. Sooner or later he’s going to attack—and without someone of your strength, we’re powerless to stop him.”
Chapter 18- Anna
Trevor rose from where he’d been squatting next to the energy field. He began pacing, a precise five steps from one corner of their cell to the other. David had somehow mod
ified the field to keep out sound, and it seemed to block all types of signal. None of Trevor’s shaping had affected it in any way.
They had no way of keeping time, but Trevor was fairly certain a couple days had passed. They might have already missed their first check-in.
“Will you please stop doing that?” Irakesh said. His voice was jarring after the prolonged silence.
“What else would you like me to do?” Trevor asked, though he did stop pacing. “David holds our fate in his hands—and with Yuri egging him on to jettison us out the airlock, I’m not liking our chances.”
“That is a very serious problem,” Irakesh said, in a languid, relaxed voice that suggested the opposite. “But we can do nothing about it. Absolutely nothing. All planning is pointless. So we wait. That waiting may feel unbearable, but I promise you it will pass eventually. I have a great deal of experience with patience. For my eighth birthday, my mother locked me in my chambers for a month. Every day, she slid a tray under the door. It contained the day’s food and a note. It said ‘Be patient, and this will pass.’”
“Wow,” was all Trevor could manage. “That seems incredibly harsh.”
“Indeed it was,” Irakesh said, “but consider the lesson—and consider how early in life I learned it. I have learned a great deal more about your world and the people that dwelled in it. Your children had no patience. Even your adults had none. Everything was about instant gratification.” He gave a toothy smile. “My mother taught me the value of patience, and I have never forgotten it. I have no need to pace. If we are here for weeks, so be it.”
“If you’re so patient, then why does my pacing bother you?” Trevor shot back, then smiled. That had scored a point.
There was movement down one of the corridors, beyond the area that had been cordoned off for their cell. Trevor raised a hand to silence Irakesh, who subsided with a nod.
David and Yuri strode into the central room.
“Hello again, Trevor. Irakesh.” David nodded to each of them in turn. “I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the two of you. Your stories check out—but there are some disturbing gaps.”
“How did you fact check us? The internet is gone,” Trevor asked.
“For the most part, you’re correct,” David offered. He smiled, approaching the energy barrier. “Before the end, Mohn launched a dozen satellites into orbit. Ten of those satellites are still operational, and a number of factions all over the world tap into those satellites. Opening that communication leaves those systems vulnerable, and I’m able to breeze in and find out what I need.”
“You’re a hacker?” Trevor asked. It seemed so odd for something like that to still exist.
“Of a sort. I have abilities, I believe you’d call them shaping.” David held up a hand, and electricity crackled across his fingers. “I can generate almost any type of signal or wave, and those signals can be used to do all sorts of things. Before the world ended, I was a software engineer, so the first thing I learned to do was tap into electronics. The internet was my playground, and the few remaining systems still are.”
“That’s how you know what happened to Mohn Corp.” Trevor moved to stand at the edge of the containment field, as close to David as he could get. “You monitor everything, and they probably have no idea you’re even here.”
“No,” Yuri corrected, speaking for the first time. “They know satellite orbiting earth.” He stepped closer to the barrier as well. “Don’t know how to find. If we broadcast signal, they find.”
“So you can listen, but not talk?” Trevor asked.
“Precisely,” David said. He seemed pleased that Trevor was able to follow along. “We do a great deal of listening, and deploy Solaris’s teams to deal with the things we’re able to tackle.”
“What are you, exactly?” Irakesh asked, finally rising to his feet. “You are neither god nor sorcerer, so far as I can tell. How did you get your abilities?”
“Not by choice, that’s for damned sure.” David’s face hardened. “Before the world ended, I was an abductee. As far as the world was concerned, that made me crazy, but it was the truth. We call them the grey men, and they experimented on thousands of us across the globe.”
“Why? What were they trying to create?” Trevor asked. The idea that aliens existed was something he’d been comfortable with long before the world ended. He’d never given much credence to alien abduction cases, though, because most weren’t credible.
“We call ourselves supers. Cliché, but hey, it fits. Those of us that survived the testing found we had an array of strange abilities. My wife can phase through walls, and even teleport. I can manipulate almost any signal, and I’ve met someone who can throw a tank like a baseball.”
“Yeah, but why give you those abilities?” Trevor asked. “It doesn’t make any sense. They’re creating their own enemies.”
“I get the skepticism. I asked the same thing, trust me.” David gave a weary eye roll. “The grey men were trying to create someone with my specific subset of abilities. I can simulate their technology, and I’m a Homo sapiens. The grey men have another name, something you might recognize. Have you heard of ‘the progeny of the builders’?”
“Shit,” Trevor said, his enthusiasm dampened. “Ka used that term. And so did Set. So these grey men are the Builders?”
“Their forerunners, I think. The grey men were an early expedition sent to ready the Earth for their recolonization. Their goal was to access the Ark network left behind by the Builders, but when they returned they found that those Arks had been modified. The woman you’d call Isis created a sort of lock for each Ark. Those Arks can only be accessed with someone possessing the right key.” David paused. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Trevor allowed. “I have one of those keys. I know two more people who have them as well. If I understand what you’re saying, when Isis made the Ark keys she blocked these grey men from repossessing the Arks their ancestors had created?”
“Yeah, that’s it exactly,” David said. “Isis basically changed the locks, coding the Arks to our DNA. They were experimenting on humanity, because the Arks have been modified to recognize our genetic structure. They’ll only accept an Ark Lord who started off human. The grey men know that, and have for a very long time—several thousand years, at least.”
“Why do they need the Arks so badly?” Irakesh asked. “Surely their power has grown since leaving our world countless millennia ago.”
“Because the grey men aren’t infallible. They came back to Earth assuming they’d have access to the Arks, and apparently they needed the Arks to send a message back home. Their own ships are too weak to generate a pulse strong enough to reach their home world.” David raised a hand and a shimmering holoscreen appeared.
Trevor recognized it instantly as a solar system, but it was unfamiliar to him. “That blue one is their world?”
“Yeah, so far as we know. It’s about fourteen light years away. Their ships can transmit a signal at a little slower than the speed of light, but the Arks are capable of generating a message that will travel much more swiftly. Unfortunately, the grey men were able to do exactly that. Five years ago you may have felt a pulse of incredible power being fired from the Arks.”
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “We saw that, and had no way of explaining it at the time. You’re telling me that was these grey men phoning home?”
“I’m afraid so. We tried to stop them, but they found a way around us. It turns out there are seven Arks, one for each continent. During Isis’s time, she created a lock for six of them. The seventh was buried under Antarctica, and didn’t have the same genetic safeguards. The grey men are in control of that Ark.”
“Wait a minute. Does that mean the grey men can get into the Nexus?” Trevor felt himself tensing. “David, we need to warn my friends. Blair and Jordan have to know about this. When we separated, we agreed to meet up there. They’ve already used the Arks to communicate through the N
exus.”
“Oh my god,” David said. His face had gone ashen. “We’ve got to stop them. Yuri, go to the lab and tell Anna to get prepped for deployment.”
Chapter 19- Out of Contact
“I won’t be gone long.” Blair took Liz’s hand, giving it a quick squeeze. “At least one of us has to stay. You know that.”
“I know.” Liz looked up, eyes full of emotion.
Blair drew her into a tight hug.
“Be quick,” she said. “I just can’t shake the feeling that if you leave I won’t see you for months. Every time we separate, it takes forever to find each other again. We’ve really just found each other. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t.” Blair kissed her hand. “I may be back in an hour. I just have to meet with the others so we can compare notes.”
She gave him a smile, and then he was off. He fueled his blur, leaping from hill to hill. He had no idea how fast he was going, but he crossed Rohnert Park and then Petaluma in a matter of minutes.
Along the way, he felt hundreds of canine minds reaching out. They were curious, but he was in a hurry. Introductions could come after he was back home. For now, he needed to get to the Ark before the sun set.
It had already sunk to the horizon’s edge, barely visible over a cluster of eucalyptus trees. Blair redoubled his speed, blurring straight up 101 freeway. He blew through Novato, then San Rafael, and finally into Larkspur.
The Ark was visible now. He could have simply light-walked from Santa Rosa, but it was important that he learn the terrain in this new world. That required him to see it, even if briefly.
Besides, he’d missed these rolling hills, the oak forests to one side, and the redwoods closer to the coast. This place had always been home; he was excited that it would be again. He and Liz had finally come home, and he wasn’t about to let some emergency tear him away—assuming there even was one.
