Resistance (Nomad Book 3)

by Matthew Mather

  The mention of Massarra’s name made Jess realize the Israeli hadn’t been marched into the room. Where was she? Ufuk told her to go into the main installation. Had Müller not known she was here? Massarra had saved them more than once. Jess had to remain calm, wait for an opportunity. She had to play for time.

  “But you destroyed Sanctuary,” Jess said as she squirmed against the zip ties digging into her wrists.

  “I did not,” Müller replied, his voice emotionless. “It was you and your friends who destroyed it.”

  “That’s a lie. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Even if you did not participate,” Müller said. “It was Ufuk and Massarra that set the charges that destroyed Sanctuary. Jessica, he has been lying to you. I am sorry for what I have done, I truly am, but Mr. Erdogmus is no better.”

  “More lies,” Ufuk grunted. “Why would I? And you already admitted to bombing the Vatican before Nomad, and to destabilizing the region for Israel and Iran to attack each other.”

  “No, no, no,” Müller tutted. “Those were fabricated videos, created by you. I never said any such thing. And you didn’t even show up in court to defend yourself. You were gone from Sanctuary, all of a sudden, and then it was destroyed.”

  How to tell truth from lies? Jess knew one thing he said was a blatant lie—he did admit to bombing the Vatican—but Jess was the only person alive who saw him say it in person in that jail cell at Vivas, who’d seen him say the words. Everyone else had only heard a recording or watched a video.

  And one more thing.

  She realized he wasn’t just talking to them right now. He was conducting his own trial, something others had to be watching, or would watch in the future.

  Trial and probably execution.

  Where was Massarra? On the wall screen at the far side of the room, the images of outside the facility still played. A bright flash. The Twin Otter’s cockpit exploded, and a distant thud echoed down the hallway outside. A dozen more coal-black uniformed soldiers had exited the VTOL aircraft landed outside. Above them, Ufuk’s tiny drones hovered and buzzed.

  “Should have weaponized those drones, Ufuk,” Müller said, seeing Jess’s eyes watching the display. “Nice toys for surveillance, but not useful in a fight.”

  “This place was never designed for that,” Ufuk replied.

  “Something of an oversight, I’d say, and let’s talk about that, shall we?” Müller couldn’t help himself. The calm and serious expression had shifted to bemusement. “What this place was designed for? Your friends on Mars First won’t be in much of a mood of talking with you. I mean, you killed Anders Larsson.”

  “He was your man, I had no choice,” Ufuk replied after a pause.

  “And yet he was their crewmate, and their friend. All the deceptions. Why would they trust you anymore?” Müller turned to Jess. “Even you must admit that our friend Ufuk seems to omit truth and lie, frustrating isn’t it? To be lied to?”

  Another video played on his tablet, this one of Jessica yelling at Ufuk on the airplane, just hours before. Of her pointing her weapon at Ufuk, marching him ahead of her.

  “We have everything we need,” Müller said. “Thanks to Ain Salah, I watched you enter your codes into the keypads. You’ve activated the facility—”

  “It’s not that simple,” Ufuk growled, his voice low and angry now, the calm giving way to frustration.

  Shouting erupted down the hallway.

  “I know it’s not that simple,” Müller replied. “You are a clever man, but I will figure it out, whatever it is. I have enough information now. And”—he took a step forward and pulled Hector away from Jess—“I have the backup.”

  Ufuk’s head dropped.

  “Get your hands off him.” Jess spat the words out and lurched forward, but one of the soldiers grabbed her and put her back into the seat. “And what does that mean?”

  “Why don’t you tell her?” Müller said quietly to Ufuk, obviously enjoying this.

  Ufuk remained silent.

  “What? What did you do?” Jess said, her voice rising.

  “I programmed Hector as the second DNA key for unlocking Simon.”

  “A thing that you are, a thing that you know, and a thing that you have,” Müller repeated in a singsong voice. “I have all your access cards, and dozens of hours of you tapping onto your tablet. If you won’t cooperate, then we have Hector to help us if you come to a…well, if something happens to you.”

  “Like what?”

  More shouting in the hallway.

  Jess’s heart came up into her throat, a numb tingling washed through her face.

  Massarra was dragged into the room by two soldiers. She was bloodied and beaten. Through one half-open eye she looked at Jess and shook her head. Sorry, she mouthed silently. They dropped her on the floor in the middle of the room. Hector squealed and tried to run to her, but Müller held his arm tight.

  And two more soldiers appeared.

  These ones carrying the mysterious sleek metal container.

  “God damn it!” Ufuk yelled and stamped the floor with one foot.

  “I must admit, I am curious what’s in this box,” Müller said. “But Jessica is right. Perhaps it is a bomb. You do have one orbital-capable rocket sequestered in this facility”—one of the men who dragged Massarra in whispered in his ear—“but it seems this has been damaged badly in the fight to capture your woman. She doesn’t give up easily. Killed six of my men.”

  On the floor, Massarra snorted and tried to get up on one elbow. “Seven,” she sputtered. Blood oozed from her mouth.

  “And something else I admit stumped me, Mr. Erdogmus,” Müller said, relishing every word now. “Simon, if you could bring up an image of Mars First’s trajectory?”

  Nothing happened.

  “Simon, comply,” Ufuk said quietly.

  The room lights blinked, and an instant later dimmed. The room filled with the glowing traces and dots of the solar system.

  “I honestly couldn’t understand why you sent your Mars First mission before Nomad, knowing that they would never reach Mars—but now I understand. Six other heavy missions, sent ahead in converging trajectories almost on the other side of the solar system from Earth when Nomad hit. The worst of the geomagnetic radiation missed them. So while even our most hardened military birds were damaged…”

  The image centered on six lines converging in space, followed by the red line of the Mars First ship.

  “It was brilliant,” Müller admitted. “A hundred and forty tons of equipment, put into space on covert missions, hidden on the other side of the solar system from the worst of the radiation storms. And a manned mission to collect it all, and use Saturn to slingshot all of it back to Earth. Communications, global positioning…you would literally have any remaining governments in the palm of your hand. Except all of this is mine, now.”

  Ufuk gritted his teeth and didn’t reply.

  “One thing, though. One complication.”

  This was the same word that Simon used when Ufuk had asked about the Saturn intercept, Jess realized. The artificial intelligence had said that Earth would brush past Saturn, but there was a complication.

  “Simon, play the Earth-Saturn intercept,” said Müller. With one arm around Hector, he stooped to pick up the rucksack with Ufuk’s sleek metal box in it. He was surprised at the weight and handed it to one of his men.

  The holographic image zoomed back, and then zoomed in until Saturn filled a quarter of the room. Complete silence in the room. The distant orb of the sun burned bright from a distance, and then grew larger. The tiny blue dot of Earth appeared from the darkness, and in an instant, swept past the massive bulk of Saturn and its rings. Earth’s trajectory wobbled.

  “That’s not possible. It’s not what any of the data…” Ufuk’s voice was low, his face open-mouthed with confusion. He muttered to himself for a few seconds before asking: “Sixty thousand kilometers still misses. Does it push Earth into an uninhabitable orbit?” />
  “It will change Earth’s orbit, perhaps improve it, but that is not the problem.”

  From the look on Ufuk’s face, he’d already guessed.

  “Simon,” Müller instructed. “Please replay the simulation, and slow down to real time, starting at a Saturn-to-Earth distance of seventy thousand kilometers.”

  The holographic image reset, and this time the wide rings of Saturn took up almost the whole width of the room. It took Jess a few seconds to understand what she was seeing. The Earth came edge-on toward Saturn, and as it passed, it etched a fine black line through the outer rings. It took her emotions a second to catch up to her intellect, and with this the terrible realization that the disaster of Nomad might not be over.

  Earth was going to impact Saturn’s rings.

  “But they’re mostly ice dust, aren’t they? Like a fog a few meters thick?” Jess had considered the possibility when they did the first Saturn intercept paths on her father’s laptop, but with the threat of an actual collision with Saturn a possibility, it hadn’t been a priority.

  “The rings vary up to a kilometer in thickness,” Müller replied. “Most of it tiny clumps of ice a centimeter in diameter, but with chunks up to ten meters. And yes, usually objects like this impacting the atmosphere would burn up, maybe flash high in the sky, but the kinetic energy of a collision like this—”

  “Forty kilometers a second,” Ufuk whispered. “The intercept speed.”

  “That’s right. Earth is going to cut a path a hundred thousand kilometers long through Saturn’s rings in forty minutes. Tiny particles by themselves, but combined…it’s unclear what the effects will be, as we don’t have computing facilities to fully render the effects, and that’s part of the reason—”

  “It’ll be a like a billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs going off,” Ufuk interrupted quietly, his head sagging, staring at the ground. “All at the same time, in a knife-like arc that spans halfway around the world.”

  Chapter 8

  Tanzania

  “You can have me,” Jess said, her voice quiet but trembling. She struggled to control the anger and confusion boiling inside her.

  “But I already have you.” Müller tightened his grip on Hector’s shoulder, the boy’s eyes darting back and forth, searching for an escape. Müller nodded to the Sanctuary soldiers holding the green rucksack with the sleek metal box in it. The men turned and left the room at a jog. Ufuk grunted and bared his teeth in a silent snarl.

  “I mean, I’ll admit that you never said those things,” Jess said slowly. “I’ll testify that Ufuk falsified the video. That he destroyed Sanctuary.”

  This got Müller’s attention. “I’m no fool—”

  “I’m tired of running, tired of the lies. You saw us fighting on the airplane. That wasn’t an act. The second we got here, I wanted to get away from this bastard”—she turned to Ufuk—“He lies, he cheats. And now this thing with Hector? He never told me.”

  Müller took hold of Hector’s arm. “So you want to protect the boy?”

  “I want to tell the truth.” She squirmed against the zip ties. “And I want to protect what’s left of my family. Giovanni. Hector. Raffa. If Lucca is in China, I want you to take us there. I want us to be safe and for this to be over.”

  “Transmission off,” Müller said aloud. He handed the boy to one of the soldiers to check his tablet. Satisfied, he smiled at Jessica. “Interesting.”

  “Did you take Hector, in Al-Jawf? Was that you, because of what Ufuk did?”

  “Jessica!” Ufuk yelled. “He’s going to kill all of us. Stop.”

  “Not all of you.” Müller began pacing in short circles. “And no, I didn’t snatch Hector in Al-Jawf. Despite my preparations, that is still a very complicated place.”

  “Jessica, don’t trust him,” Ufuk urged.

  Müller nodded at one of the guards.

  “How can you trust him?” Ufuk yelled. “After what he’s done to—”

  The rifle butt of the M4 of the guard cracked into Ufuk’s jaw, sending him and his chair crashing into the ground.

  “A little late for talking about trust,” Müller mused, resuming his tight pacing. “But Jessica, I sense there are conditions?”

  “You can’t kill anyone. Massarra, Ufuk, I want you to keep them alive. That’s my condition.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill them.”

  Jess sensed a sudden draft behind her. The room filled with a soft whirring. She craned her neck around. One of Ufuk’s small drones, not more two feet square, hovered in an opening in the wall that had just opened. The five remaining soldiers in the room all trained their M4s on it. The two outside the entrance pointed their weapons in each direction down the hallway.

  “Still some tricks up your sleeve, eh, Ufuk?” Müller backed up a step toward the entrance just the same, and the soldier holding the boy did the same. “Like I said, you should have weaponized your little friends. We checked the schematics, there’s—”

  The drone tilted and accelerated forward, straight at Müller.

  “Get down,” Ufuk whispered and kicked Jess’s chair hard.

  She took the hint and swung her weight sideways.

  The two guards closest to Müller opened fire, their silenced M4s stuttering and blazing. Rounds ricocheted and punctured the room’s walls. The drone dinged sideways as it was hit, but still accelerated. Müller sidestepped easily and it darted past him.

  It hit the wall and disintegrated into shards.

  An instant later, a blast of heat hit Jess in the face as she fell sideways onto the floor, still bound in her chair. Müller was knocked from his feet by the explosion. More gunfire behind Jess, and then the blossoming heat of more explosions. More like ignitions. Screaming. One of the soldiers stumbled over Ufuk’s chair. The man was on fire.

  Müller scrambled back to his feet. Another drone sliced through the air to crash into the wall next to him. It exploded in a detonation of pink and red, lighting his coat in a burst of yellow flames. He screamed and pulled his jacket off and stumbled backward through the entrance, clawing at his face.

  Jess strained to look around, her face pressed against the metal floor. Where was Hector? She caught a glimpse of his kicking feet as one of the men carried him over his shoulder into the hallway. More drones whirred over her head and exploded in the corridor. More screaming and staccato buzz of silenced automatic weapons.

  “Hold still.”

  Jess’s hands came free and someone pulled her upright. It was Peter Connor. Somehow he’d gotten free and had taken a knife from the soldier still writhing in flames on the floor. Peter cut Ufuk’s and Giovanni’s bindings, then grabbed the M4 from the floor and shot the soldier, hardly bothering to look at the man as he did.

  “Is there a back way out of here?” Peter said to Ufuk.

  “We need to get Hector!” Jess screamed. She wobbled to her feet to run into the hallway, but was pressed back by a blast of heat. The hallway was an inferno. More drones sped past them and exploded in the conflagration.

  “This way.” Ufuk pulled her arm. “It’s the only way.” He pointed to the opening in the back of the room. Two more drones whizzed through it and whirred past them into the corridor. “They’re powered by liquid hydrogen, I told you.”

  The large wall screens were still active inside the room, despite punctures from bullets. The images were flickering, but still showed the scene outside. The tiny drones buzzed around the large military VTOL aircraft. Their automated Gatling guns targeted the drones, firing hundreds of rounds a second. The noise of it echoed through the blaze in the hallway. The drones circled and buzzed, an angry wasp nest, and dove Kamikaze-style into the military equipment and soldiers. Flames leapt into the air.

  Müller appeared, the image grainy, but unmistakable—and still holding his face.

  He ran into one of the VTOLs next to the entrance with Hector swung over the shoulder of the man following him. None of the drones dive-bombed anywhere near the path of Müller
. In a blast of dust, the angular VTOL rose into the air.

  Jess stared at the screen in mute disbelief. They had Hector.

  “Come on,” Ufuk urged. “We need to go. I’m closing down the facility.”

  Peter Connor had Massarra over his shoulder. She was streaked in blood. He and Giovanni eased her through the opened in the other side of the room. Jess watched the VTOL aircraft disappeared into the distance, followed by a second that lifted off. The third one exploded in flames as it tried to get away, hammered by a barrage of dozens of killer drones. The aircraft tumbled to the ground in a blazing heap next to the destroyed remains of the Otter.

  Ufuk had dragged Jess to the side of the room. “He’ll be back, we have to hurry.”

  He jumped up into the opening, and Jess finally tore her eyes away from the screen and followed him. “We have to get Raffa,” she whispered.

  “Of course.”

  Lights flickered in the next room, and they exited into another hallway. This one was charred and still filled with smoke, but with no flames as the remains of extinguisher dust settled. Peter kept Massarra on his shoulder as they ran, and past each intersection, heavy doors sealed behind them. Rounding the corner to the infirmary, Jess took the lead, and ran straight into Raffa. He brandished a scalpel in one hand.

  “Are you okay?”

  The boy almost collapsed the second he saw it was them. Giovanni grabbed him and pulled him back the bed, while Peter rushed Massarra onto the one beside it. The digital doctor reappeared. Sirens wailed. Peter ripped open Massarra’s shirt to reveal an oozing bullet wound. He swore and ran to the medical supply drawers.

  Ufuk slid to the floor next to Massarra, his face in his hands. “All for nothing. It’s all for nothing.”

  Jess knelt beside him. “You have to get me out of here. How do I follow Müller?”

  “You can’t. He’s gone. We don’t have anything that can match those aircraft, even if they’re air-breathers.”