Annie wanted to say that while it indeed was her, she didn’t actually do it fully on purpose. This seemed like a bad time for sharing, though.
“Yep, it was.”
“Thought so.”
“Wendy,” Annie said, “I’m going to go with Oona. You guys can follow, if you want.”
“I’m truly sorry to hear that,” Wendy said. Into her radio she said, “take the target.”
Annie heard the gunshot, but didn’t appreciate that she was the target until well after Cora threw herself in the path of the bullet, knocking over both Annie and Lindsey in the process. Then there was a lot more gunplay, as Laura on the roof returned fire.
It was the extra agent, the one whose name Annie never got, from the corner of one of the quads.
“Cora!” Annie cried.
Cora was on top of her. Lindsey, also on the ground but not under anybody, crawled to her knees.
“I’m okay,” Cora said. “He hit the jacket. Get moving.”
Cora rolled off, but didn’t look like she was in nearly as good shape as she thought she was.
“Lindsey, help us!” Annie said. She was trying to pull Cora to her feet. Lindsey looked pretty panicked, which sort of made sense given a lot of guns were being shot in a lot of directions.
“Yes, okay, okay,” she said.
The two of them got Cora up. A few yards away, Oona was aiming two handguns in two directions: one at the van, one at the quads.
Wainwright is definitely not letting me come back, Annie decided. It was a strange thing to think given she wasn’t at all certain she’d be around for another five minutes, never mind her sophomore year.
“HURRY UP, GIRL,” Oona shouted.
Annie and Lindsey stumbled forward with Cora, whose legs weren’t working all that well, when Annie spotted Wendy Riviera crouched on the other side of the fender at the front of the van. Oona and Laura didn’t have an angle, and were too busy keeping the shooters on the roof busy anyway.
Wendy had a clean shot.
Way back when Annie first worked out the threat—the one at the end of the letter meant to prevent people from trying to kill her—she had to put in a lot of work on perfecting the weapon she expected to never have to use.
The ship had a lot of options, but the one that looked most promising was something along the lines of a pulse cannon. It fired high-energy blasts, which seemed fine, except that the original version was intended to destroy small cities. Annie had to adjust the gauge—make the radius of the beam much smaller and less energetic—so that it could assassinate someone without also annihilating everyone nearby.
She called it a laser from space, because that was a decent short-hand threat, but it was a good deal more complicated than that.
Annie was pretty glad she put in all that work, given how close she was to the first applied use of the modified weapon. Now, in the crosshairs of the woman who was supposed to be protecting Annie, it was time to use it again.
The engine block, she thought, pushing the idea up to the ship. No deaths, please.
The strike landed a couple of seconds later, in a bright, noisy burst that completely destroyed the front of the van.
One of the shooters on the roof flew off and landed in the street. The second just fell out of sight but was probably still on the roof. Wendy Riviera, being closest to the engine, disappeared entirely.
Annie had no way of telling if her admonition that nobody be killed ended up working out, but she had tried her best.
They reached Oona, who holstered one of the guns to get Cora off their hands.
“You sure she’s coming, kid?” Oona asked. “She’s one of them.”
“Of course, she’s coming.”
“All right. Mind the grenades.”
Annie and Lindsey stumbled into the camper, nearly tripping on a plastic tub full of what appeared to be homemade bombs. Cora came next, staggering a little, but showing the kind of movement in her lower extremities that looked promising. Annie helped her to a couch.
“How you doing?” Annie asked.
“Bullet hit low,” Cora said. “Lower spine’s bruised. Good thing Doug can’t shoot.”
“He didn’t miss, though.”
“That was meant to be a head shot, pretty sure.”
Oona came in last, slammed the door, and slid a variety of heavy steel deadbolts across it.
“Why ain’t we moving, Dobbs?” she shouted.
“Holy crap, did you guys see that?” he said from the driver’s seat.
“We saw, get us out of here before they call in a goddamn airstrike.”
“Will do. Hey Annie.”
“Hey Dobbs. Long time.”
“Too long. We should try lunch or something, like, without an apocalypse.”
“Put it in gear, Dobbs!” Oona barked.
“We’re moving. Someone want to make sure Laura’s secured?”
The MP’s didn’t bring them to the base commander, which was a surprise. Instead, Sam and Ed were taken to a slightly less welcoming room than the office they’d only recently occupied, and then left alone. It had no computer and no windows, only a table and a few chairs.
It felt like an interrogation room. It probably was.
After a short time during which Ed and Sam discussed the likelihood (which they felt was quite high) that this involved Annie in some way, Melissa Braver entered the room.
“Sit down, both of you,” she said. “Something’s happened.”
“We already knew that much,” Ed said.
“Is Annie okay?” Sam asked.
Mel looked aggravated by the question, and continued to address Ed.
“Your girl’s gone off the reservation.”
“Answer Sam’s question,” Ed said.
“Yes, she’s okay. It’s not her we’re worried about, it’s the rest of us. She fired a weapon from the ship tonight, twice. The first time it was in the middle of a party taking place on the campus, and the second time was just a few minutes ago. The second one was fired at the Secret Service team attempting to secure her.”
Neither Ed nor Sam knew exactly what to say to that, so nobody spoke for a few seconds.
“Did she kill anybody?” Sam asked quietly.
“We don’t know yet. This is a fluid situation.”
“Where is she?” Ed asked.
“We don’t know that either. We lost contact with the ground after the second blast. The ship has made a couple of minor adjustments to its orbit, so we think she’s on the move, but right now we don’t know how or with whom.”
“So, this really just happened.”
“Like I said, it’s fluid.”
“They got you here from Washington in the past ten minutes?”
“I was already here,” she said.
Ed thought that was a pretty interesting detail.
“Nope,” Sam said, standing. Sam was a pacer when he was agitated. It was a good tendency when you were accustomed to guarding a perimeter. “Nope, I don’t believe any of that. Something else happened.”
“We assumed you’d say that,” Melissa said.
“Because you’re wrong.”
“Sam,” Ed said calmly. He gestured in a way that suggested he needed his friend to calm it down a little. This was a fluid situation for them as well. Sam shook his head and leaned up against the wall, arms crossed. If he decided to march out of the room he was going to end up formally detained by the guards in the hall. Ed knew this; he hoped Sam did too.
“What led up to this?” Ed asked Mel.
Because I agree with Sam, he thought.
“We don’t know yet. We were hoping you had some insight. When was the last time either of you spoke to her?”
“Hold on,” Ed said. “This wasn’t out of nowhere. You were here to debrief me about something already.”
“I was. Did you check your messages?”
“Some of them.”
“Those are just the reports that made it all the way to you.
There’ve been a lot more. We’re of the opinion that she’s doing this somehow.”
“Doing… what?”
Mel grimaced.
“It sounds crazy to even say these things out loud, but we all saw what the ship could do to anyone who tried to touch it, so the concept is in play. Now we’ve got this little kid connected to the ship in ways she refuses to explain, and it looks like half the country is starting to have nightmares in the middle of the day. That’s before we talk about what we’re beginning to see internationally. This is a world full of unstable people on a good day, and a lot of those unstable people have direct access to very scary weapons. So yeah, this is a big deal. It looks to us like Annie Collins is pushing intrusive thoughts on the whole damn world, whether she even knows she’s doing it or not.”
“That’s what you think this is?” Ed asked. “Intrusive thoughts?”
“I don’t know what else to call it. It appears to be experientially different in a few ways. You described what it felt like when you tried touching the ship; I can tell you that this is less intense.”
“You’ve experienced it.”
“I have, yes. I’ve been staying at a hotel for more than a week, because I’m positive my townhouse is haunted. It’s ridiculous, but it’s what it feels like. Two nights in a row, I was certain there was someone standing directly behind me, and I was alone. I didn’t get any sleep either of those two nights, and that wasn’t even the whole of it. After the second night, the thought came to me with the same clarity as the conviction that there was a ghost: Annie was responsible for how I felt.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sam said.
“Yes, it is,” Melissa said. “I mean, I agree with you, sergeant. It is ridiculous. But so is a spaceship that protects itself with bad feelings. And Ed, I don’t know anywhere this technology exists outside of that ship, and I don’t know anyone who has access to that technology aside from Annie Collins. So you tell me what I should think.”
Violet Jones, Ed thought. He didn’t believe Violet had access to the spaceship, but she had one of her own, with a lot of the same tech.
He wondered if this was the time to finally betray that one last secret he’d been keeping about the night of The Incident. Doing so would, at minimum, take some of the heat off of Annie until he had a chance to figure out what was really going on.
He locked eyes with Sam, who was clearly struggling with a similar question. Sam hadn’t been carrying the burden of Violet’s secret nearly as long, and had very little invested in holding onto it.
Ed shook his head no, very briefly. If Mel noticed, she didn’t indicate it.
“I don’t know what to think yet,” Ed said. “But I should have been working on this problem well before now. Why didn’t you reach out to me?”
“You were on your Latvian adventure,” she said.
“You and I had a secure line.”
She sighed.
“Yes, we did. There are some who feel you may be compromised when it comes to this particular subject.”
“That subject being Annie.”
“Of course.”
That wasn’t what she meant, not really. Yes, he was an expert when it came to Annie Collins, more so than Sam or anyone else—aside perhaps from Violet, who didn’t really count. Where he was compromised was when it came down to making the difficult choice. At the end of all of this, if the unnamed ‘we’ that Captain Braver kept referring to, decided the threat of a living Annie Collins was greater than a dead one, Ed would not be on board with it. He’d also tip Annie off, which would make any assassination attempt a lot more difficult.
Taking that train of thought one step further, Ed figured someone must have been hired to do the thing he used to do: write a risk assessment, game-plan possible outcomes, and map out a series of steps to take, in the event the unthinkable happened.
Annie firing weapons from space was definitely an indication that the unthinkable was happening, but Ed thought they probably hadn’t decided on anything just yet. If they had, he and Sam would already be tied up and on the way to an isolated lockdown location somewhere. Or, they would be dead.
That’s what Ed would have suggested, if he were writing the game-plan.
“The two people on the government payroll who know her best are in this room, Melissa. Let’s call her, and see what’s going on. I have to believe she saw herself in a situation where she had no other option.”
“That would have to be one heck of an explanation. You heard the part where she targeted her security detail, right? She blew up a tactical vehicle.”
“How’d she do that, again?” Sam asked.
“Lasers from space, just like she always threatened she’d do if she felt like it.”
“I don’t think that’s an accurate portrayal of what she said,” Ed said.
Sam mostly looked confused, but his clearance wasn’t high enough to have read the document that started showing up on everyone’s computers after The Incident. Even with the clearance, Ed doubted Sam would ever receive one; it was reserved for people who could pose a potential threat. Ed didn’t get one, either.
“She said she’d blow up anyone who pissed her off,” Mel said. “Sure, fine, I’m paraphrasing, but not all that much.”
“Let us talk to her,” Ed repeated.
“Oh, I’d love to. If you know where Annie is and how to reach her, me and a whole lot of other people would be happy to help. But she doesn’t have her phone; we checked. The GPS puts it in the dorm. She didn’t go around with it half the time anyway, which I guess makes sense when the Secret Service is there to field calls.”
“What about Agent Blankenship?” Ed asked.
“Ed, again: she blew up her security detail. The smoke hasn’t even cleared yet, but we’re pretty sure she did that to shed the Service coverage.”
“Cora wouldn’t have been in the van,” Ed said.
“Fine, we’ll check. Now when was the last time either you spoke to Annie?”
“I think before the semester began,” Ed said. “February, probably.”
“We spoke at her mother’s funeral,” Sam said. “Not since then.”
“All right,” Melissa said, nodding. “The guys outside are gonna escort you to temporary quarters. I have to dial back in for updates.”
“Are we prisoners?” Sam asked.
“You haven’t been arrested, sergeant, but we also don’t want you out of our sight. Ed was correct when he said you two are the only ones around who know Annie well and also pull down a government salary. We’d like to keep you in pocket.”
“Not prisoners, but we can’t go anywhere,” Ed said.
“You got it,” she said, getting to her feet. “But I promise as soon as I have more info I’ll give it to you. I don’t like that it’s come to this either. Not that it’s any surprise.”
“How do you mean?” Ed asked.
“Well, come on, Edgar. She should have never kept the ship. It was selfish. You must have realized that at some point over the past couple of years.”
Sam tensed visibly at the word selfish.
“Interesting word choice,” Ed said blandly.
17
Communication Breakup
Caller: We all knew this was going to happen someday. The pressure got to her. I’m surprised she made it to the end of the school year.
Janet: Caller, are you near the scene?
Caller: No, but I can see it. I think everybody’s dead, probably. She’s crazy. Everybody knew it.
Janet Yellen News Hour, Public Radio
Annie had a hundred questions, but first she had to sit down and stick her head between her knees until everything stopped spinning. Lindsey, the only other person in the camper who arrived at that point unprepared (she excluded Cora, who was professionally always-ready) was in the bathroom throwing up, so by comparison, Annie’s response seemed pretty good.
Laura came down from the roof as soon as the camper hit the first red light. She was rubbin
g Annie’s back, because that’s the sort of thing you did around upset people.
“Hey, hey, we’re okay,” Laura said. “Good to see you again, by the way.”
“You too,” Annie said quietly. “They tried to kill me, Laura.”
“They sure did,” Oona said. “Can’t say I was surprised.”
“Stop it,” Laura said. “You don’t trust anyone in the government as it is.”
“And I’m always right, aren’t I?”
Cora sat up, slowly.
The inside of the camper was far cleaner and more spacious than the last one Annie saw Oona and Laura in. This appeared to be a new one.
The couch Cora was on was near the back of the cabin, along a side wall. Annie was in a chair in the forward part, facing front, next to the crate of improvised explosive devices.
“Hey,” Cora said. “Are you all right Annie?”
“Not really.”
“I mean, are you wounded?”
“Oh. No.”
“She gave the order, I heard it. I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody ever suggested you might be… I mean this wasn’t part of any meeting I ever attended.”
“Oh, you say that,” Oona said, “but they been talking about it for a couple of days, at least. You did something to piss off your keepers, Annie.”
Oona was patting her hip—where one of her handguns happened to be located—and glaring at Cora.
“Oona, don’t,” Laura said.
“Why?” Annie asked. “Why would they want to do that?”
“Not sure,” Oona said. “There’s something making people crazy, and those folks in the van and the people they take orders from all think you’re responsible. That’s why we’re here too.”
“I don’t understand,” Annie said. “What do you all think I’m doing?”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 24
