"Quite a show," echoed Dierdre. She turned and gave her husband a blank stare, as if trying to remember who he was. "You brought my book?" she asked.
Sinclair nodded. Dierdre had insisted she be allowed to finish the latest Stephen King, which she was about halfway through. "I did," he said.
Dierdre frowned and returned her attention to the viewscreen.
18.9
Linda felt exhausted and dirty and hungry. The replacement plane came with neither a shower nor a meal, and the flight had been rough: the air in the cabin was cold and smelled of jet fuel and the turbulence was low level but almost constant. By the end of their three hours in the air, she felt like she wanted to scream.
But at whom might she scream? Certainly not the pilots, two kind, smiley men who seemed to understand almost no English. And neither were Cole or her other companions responsible for her pain. Whom she really wanted to scream at was a man named William. And that's exactly what she intended to do. But first she had to find him, so first she had to get to where she was sure he was. Urbem Orsus. She was now less than twenty miles away.
They were heading north in two black mini-vans, both driven, surprisingly, by young black American women. They'd followed the P02 north along the Kiev reservoir and then west to Ivankov, where they turned east and north on the P56 to head toward the town of Chernobyl itself, which lay well inside the southern boundary of the CEZ. The exclusion zone, once open to guided tours, was now more strictly guarded than ever, explained the drivers. The global financial crash had gutted what remained of the Ukrainian economy, but the government and church had somehow managed to come together and devise a fairly sane and violence free powering down of their culture, largely avoiding the wars, pogroms, cleansings, and mass relocations that had raged around them on all sides. Though the cities had been mostly abandoned, the Ukraine countryside through which they drove appeared to be a fairly prosperous farming region. There were men and women in the fields, and children playing or herding animals, and some of them smiled and waved as the vans drove past. Linda guessed that the scene looked much as it had over a hundred years before.
When asked how the Ukrainians had managed to pull off what amounted to a modern miracle, the driver of Linda's mini-van, an ex-Air Force major named Brenda, laughed a bit. "It's generally understood that the elite rulers of the world now live in Ukraine, and that it's they who have fashioned this peaceful situation."
"They know that The Families are here?" asked Linda, her voice incredulous.
Brenda nodded. "Yes, Madam President," she said. She gestured with her head to indicate the area ahead of them. "They watch the trucks go in and out. And sometimes, at night, they see the strange lights in the sky." She turned her head to eye the President. "They don't know much, but they know that they are here, and they're thankful."
Linda shook her head in wonder. They passed a sign. There was a checkpoint station just ahead and Linda winced, remembering another border crossing she'd rather forget, and the tragic loss of a new friend, and the terrible events that followed.
Brenda slowed to a stop before the closed chain-link gate and rolled down her window to speak in fluent Ukrainian to the sentry who came out of the tiny guard hut. The second mini-van, in which rode Annabelle, Doobie, and Marionette, pulled to a stop behind them. The guard spoke to Brenda for a long time in a low-key manner, then glanced up to see Linda sitting in the front passenger seat. His eyes widened and he looked to the driver with fear and questioning in his eyes. Brenda spoke a short phrase and flashed him a second identification card. The man examined the card, then smiled at Brenda, saying something in heavily accented English that took Linda a moment to decipher: "Bluebird." The guard bowed deeply and gestured for the other sentries to open the gate. The chain link rolled open, Brenda put her vehicle in gear, and both vans pulled through.
They were inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
18.10
The final boarding announcement, a gentle, firm, computer-generated woman's voice that spoke in English with no discernible accent, repeated itself once per minute now. Danny and Gina lay on their bunks, listening, waiting. There was no particular place they had to be at the moment of launch. There was no strapping in. No special seating needed to counteract the g-forces. No way to be "in the way." On a wok, it was usually impossible to even tell when it was in motion. But they stayed in their barracks just the same. They didn't know anybody here. They hadn't spent the last weeks and months and years working side by side with these folks, as many of them apparently had done. So they weren't sure how to fit in. They didn't feel like they belonged.
They'd assumed that Director Sinclair would check in on them before launch. Make sure they were doing okay. Introduce them around, maybe. But they hadn't seen nor heard from him since he checked them in at the security gate in the small hangar where they'd landed their seventeen-footers. Gina felt snubbed, but Danny argued that the Director must be busy with his own affairs at this very tense time and was simply trusting them to make their own way and prove on their own that they belonged there. He hoped he was reading the situation correctly.
It had occurred to them earlier that they didn't even know where the Kill 'Em All was headed. Which colony on which planet or asteroid in which star system in which galaxy. Director Sinclair had said that he wanted to take them both on in his employ, so they assumed that they were headed to the same place Sinclair was headed. But they knew how assumptions could prove to be wrong. Their greatest worry was that somebody would spot them, catch them, accuse them, say that they didn't belong, and kick them off before the colony woks had left the Earth. It wasn't like Sinclair had given them special badges or IDs or anything. The guard at the security checkpoint had scanned their iDent chips, something that he hadn't done with Sinclair. So maybe they were in the computer now. They hoped so. Otherwise they had no proof to back up their story, should they be questioned. Another reason to just stay in their bunks.
Gina had wanted to go find a viewscreen somewhere and see if they could watch the event as it happened. Apparently it would all start with something called the "One-Two Punch," which they assumed meant that the colony woks would have to break their way through the alien's Grid. That might be worth watching. But Danny convinced her that they should stay put. They could watch this historical event later, as it would no doubt be recorded for posterity.
For now... just wait. Breathe. Listen. Stay calm. And start to dream a new future together, on some distant world. They'd find out soon enough what it would look like.
18.11
Alice sat on the sofa in the nullspace common room. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was soft and slow. But her mind was active. It ranged out to commune with the other Middle Children, those still helping with the rescues at the coast, those slogging through jumptime in search of the lost Iain, those maintaining the social, medical, and governmental systems of Augusta, ME, those working to analyze the contents of a small brown vial. She could tell that the dawn had come to Maine, and knew that, were there a window here, she would have seen the sun just peeking over the tree line. And she could sense the peaceful sleep of Grace and Ness, the quiet activity of Isaac getting ready for the day, the near-wakefulness of Emily and the meditating mind of Mary.
Further afield, Alice could feel the Interdict, and the presence of her father and his people as they awaited the crucial moment. She could sense the minds of those few Middle Children who had volunteered to be embedded in the project the human elite called the Giant Leap, as they awaited the crucial moment from their places inside the huge human-built ships. And now and then, she could feel the bare echo of the being she knew as Zacharael as he, like Alice, monitored the globe. He was searching for someone, it felt like. Someone he had lost. And he was angry. Alice could sense nothing more.
There was a flash on Alice's awareness, followed by a steady glow. It had begun. Alice opened her eyes and pushed herself to her feet. It could all move very quickly now. She had to be ready.
Just in case.
18.12
Once inside the CEZ, the van drivers pulled into an abandoned service station, where they picked up a man named Raf, who had worked previously as a Chernobyl tour guide. Like Marionette, Raf had one patched eye. Unlike Marionette, Raf had only half a dozen teeth. His face, dark and pitted and stubbled with gray beard, was nevertheless open and happy and likable, and Linda made friends with him right away. He was a Bluebird man, he said in his broken, accented English. Linda had come to trust Mr. Bluebird and his people.
With Raf joining them in the lead van, they made their way further northward into the exclusion zone. Brenda drove slowly, wary of wildlife in the roadway and giving Linda and her colleagues ample time to view the surroundings. They saw vast swaths of previously cultivated land returning to wildness, as forests and marshes and rivers encroached and overran the countryside. They saw deer and bison and boar, ducks and geese and eagles, one lone moose and what might have been a wolf in the distance. They saw rusting farm equipment, collapsing roofs, burned out houses and barns, the remnants of orchards, and fields filled with flowers.
This area was still quite wet, compared with the new, hot, dry climate regime of Augusta, Maine. There were rivers and swamps and estuaries and beaver dams flooding the fields and forests. There were waterfowl and shorebirds in abundance. And everywhere there were orange and yellow signs bearing the radiation warning symbol. And at each village, a large boulder, on which had been painted the village's name and the number of souls who had lived there. Save for the ruins, it all looked quite normal, a beautiful spring day in the countryside. Yet they knew that there was radiation everywhere, waiting to be dug up from the ground and spilled out with the water. It reminded Linda of Keeley's hospital room, where she'd lain sick with the alien flu, in isolation from the world. It had looked so normal. Yet the air, they had thought at the time, had been filled with a deadly presence. Unseen dangers made the world feel surreal.
Right on the edge of the ghost town Chernobyl, after which the nuclear power plant, and the disaster itself, had been named, they saw a bright flash in the distance. Brenda pulled off the road, into a broken, overgrown parking lot in front of a collapsing elementary school, and came to a stop. The other van parked beside them and the two drivers, Linda and Cole and their crew, and the guide, Raf, got out of the car to scan the sky. Rising from a spot to the north and west of their position, from what appeared to be the abandoned city of Pripyat where the power plant was actually located, was a bright blue-white light with a yellow tail, like a rocket launching to the stars. After a moment, a second bright flash and a second rocket. Then a third and a fourth in rapid succession. Then more, all rising together in a cluster, gaining speed as they ascended, blue-white stars on yellow columns of fire, like giant dandelion puffs on stems. In less than a minute, there were too many to count, and they were all headed toward the same spot in the sky, directly overhead.
18.13
Zacharael saw the energy pulses and quickly scanned the near future to see the human-Life weapon systems known as "antigrav clusters" as they burst into the Interdict. He followed the clusters backward in time and space to their origination point. This was the clue he needed. Gabrielle had been taken from him. Hidden from his sight while his attention had been elsewhere. Now he had an idea where to look for her. Where one found power, one found the wielders of power. It had taken such powers to steal his human agent away from him. Perhaps now he could steal her back.
18.14
Following the dandelion puffs came huge, pulsing beams of sparkling purple energy. They coalesced into what seemed to be a vast tube of light and power that stretched straight and true from the ground to the point in the sky, almost directly overhead, where the rockets were heading. The purple tube roared like a waterfall, sending wave after wave of sparkling motes along its outer shell. The rockets, now inside the tube, began to burst in vast explosions of orange and yellow fire as they reached their target at the edge of space. The blasts sounded in the sky like thunderbolts. Whomever was responsible for this attack, they were clearly attempting to break a hole through the Grid.
Linda shielded her eyes from the display, then motioned to Cole and Brenda. "We have no idea whether this can hurt us!" she shouted over the din. "We need to get inside!" She opened her door and crawled into the van, motioning for the others to do the same. Brenda tried to start her van. The engine would not even turn over. Whether the cars would provide any protection was a moot point now. They had nowhere else to go.
18.15
Sinclair smiled lovingly at his wife. Dierdre had fallen asleep, bless her heart. She was missing the show. He glanced up at the lounge's viewscreen. Behind them stood the bartender, the server, and a small group of fellow passengers, including the Master's Right Man, Club, who no doubt felt a bit useless here inside Leader One. From what Sinclair could tell, the One-Two Punch was proceeding exactly as planned. Though all he had to go on was the visual data from the video, it surely seemed to him that the clusters had done their job and taken out the necessary Grid points. As long as the scalar cannon array could hold the hole open - and that would depend in part on their alien mole having done his job - they'd have no problem now. They might already be moving, as far as he knew. It was difficult to tell on the viewscreen, as the feed originated from a ground-based camera.
He finished his sparkling water. Time for something a bit more celebratory. He turned to the bartender. "Do you mind if I grab a bottle?" he asked.
The bartender nodded without looking at him. Sinclair chuckled. The show was so enthralling that the bartender could forget himself and allow a Director to serve his own drinks. That was as it should be. This day would live in the collective memory of the new colonies for decades and centuries to come. The beginning of a new era for the human species. The Giant Leap. Armstrong didn't know what the hell he'd been talking about.
18.16
Linda and her companions watched the pulsing purple energy cylinder rising from the town of Pripyat, just to their north and west. At soon as the dandelion rockets had all exploded, a massive disc rose slowly above the tree line, inside the purple tube that angled up to the sky. It was the largest wok Linda had ever seen or imagined. It must have been almost a mile across, and it glowed orange against the blue afternoon sky.
As it rose up inside the tube, another massive wok followed close behind it, and then another, and another. Soon there was a stack of over a dozen of these vast ships, all glowing and pulsing together. Linda shielded her eyes as their glows changed from deep orange to yellow, and then to a bright yellow-white. As one, the stack of ships flashed a white as bright and blinding as a nuclear airburst. Then they were gone, up through the tube, through what Linda assumed was a hole in the Grid, and off into the depths of space. It had transpired without a sound from the woks themselves, though they could still hear the roar of the purple cylinder.
The Families were gone.
18.17
In the storage hold of the vast command wok known as Leader One, a small black ball appeared. It disappeared a few moments later. It took with it a six-foot-long metallic cylinder.
18.18
Danny rose from his bunk at the sound of a woman screaming in the distance. Gina raised her arm, which she'd been holding over her eyes in an attempt to calm herself. "What's that?" she asked.
"I don't know," said Danny. He stepped toward the door and opened it, leaning forward to peek out into the hall. There was no one. Gina rolled out of her bunk and followed. Together they walked down the hall toward the screaming.
A few moments' walk brought them to a common room, where a great many of their colleagues had gathered. In the center of a small group stood an older woman dressed in expensive clothes, sobbing loudly. Danny stepped to the edge of the circle and stopped behind a young man in coveralls. "What happened?" he asked quietly.
The man spoke without turning toward him. "Says her husband just got sucked through the wall," he said.
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br /> 18.19
As soon as the woks had disappeared through the hole, the purple energy beams fell away to nothing. The rockets had all burst. The woks were gone. The sky looked like a normal sky, with the Grid, looking as whole and impenetrable as ever, just starting to be visible in the fading late-afternoon light. Brenda opened her door and stepped out to get a better look. Linda joined her. Cole got out and stretched his legs and arms and shoulders before scanning the area around them. Raf, the guide, opened his door and leaned out to peer upward, but stayed in his seat. The driver of the second van, a young woman named Muriel, got out, followed by Annabelle, Doobie, and Marionette. The four of them looked around in wonder and confusion. Whatever it was they had just witnessed, it seemed to be over. The quiet had returned to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
"What's that?" asked Marionette, pointing straight up, where the rockets had burst and the woks had disappeared.
The rest of them stared in the direction she was pointing. Nobody said anything for a few moments. Then Cole spoke. "That little black speck?" he asked. "Maybe a vulture?" Vultures seemed like a fitting sight for this place and time.
"There's another one," said Doobie.
"And a third one," said Linda.
Rumi's Field (None So Blind Book 2) Page 69
