“Long story.”
“Can I get you something for the pain?” Laura asked Cora, who was really having a lot of trouble.
“That would be great, I… oh.”
Cora got to her feet and started going through her own clothing, removing electronic equipment as she went and tossing what she found on the floor.
“There are GPS locators in all of this,” she said. “We have to destroy everything.”
“Well that would be a terrible idea,” Oona said.
“They’ll use me to find her,” Cora said. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but my superior just gave orders to shoot the person I swore to protect, so right now I’m with you: I don’t trust anybody from the government either.”
“You misunderstand, agent,” Oona said. “But by Jesus, I do like the way you’re thinking. How about once we get on the highway we find a good place to put these?”
Laura appeared to understand, even if nobody else did. “Nobody’s following us right now anyway,” she said. “Right Dobbs? Are we alone?”
“This is the most conspicuous vehicle around,” he said, “other than Annie’s ship. But I think we are. Highway’s a few minutes off and we’ve passed three lit cop cruisers going the other way. Don’t think anybody’s looking yet.”
“We got police band,” Oona added. “We can keep track. Annie, girl, did you kill all of ‘em?”
“I don’t think so, no,” Annie said. She tried sitting up, and that seemed to work out okay, so she stayed like that for a bit. “I said no deaths.”
“To who?”
“The ship. Never mind, that sounds crazy.”
“Nothing sounds crazy around Annie Collins,” Oona said. “That’s why we like you so much. But that’s gonna be a problem for us going forward, if there’s someone left alive who can provide a description.”
“You don’t know why they did that?” Annie asked Cora.
“I swear, I was as surprised as you.”
“Order came down two days ago,” Oona said. “We all heard it. Got a recording, too.”
“How could you even know that?” Cora asked.
“We hacked an alien signal already; this was a lot easier. Your security’s crap.”
Lindsey came out of the bathroom, rocking a lot more than the vehicle’s motion should have been expected to make her rock. She sat down next to Cora, mostly because it was the first seat available that wasn’t the floor.
“And who’s this?” Oona asked.
“That’s Lindsey. She saved my life too.”
“I thought she was attacking you,” Cora said.
“I know, but Ginger was the one with the knife. Lindsey saw it first. And then…”
Oh God, Duke, she thought. In the mayhem that followed, she’d completely forgotten about that particular moment of betrayal.
“They were trying to kill me too,” Annie said. “At the party. My friends.”
“I have some data I can show you,” Lindsey said. “Things have been getting bad, I think something’s wrong with everybody. It’s like the whole world started hating you at the same time.”
“I was always aiming for overexposure,” Annie said. “If people got sick of seeing me around I figured they’d eventually leave me alone. I wasn’t going for hatred.”
Annie looked at Oona and Laura.
“Is that why you guys showed up?” she asked.
“There’s a signal,” Laura said. “It’s strongest around you, so we thought you might be doing it.”
“I’m… I’m not.”
“We don’t mean on purpose. We figured it either had to be you, or the other girl, and we already checked her.”
“Other girl?”
“Hold up,” Oona said. “You’re asking it wrong, babe. Look kid, before we get any further, I have to know, did you do something to our heads?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“On zombie night, did you go into our heads and move some things around in there? Maybe make us forget something? Or someone?”
“Did I do that? No.”
Oona shot a quick glance over at Dobbs, who was clearly listening, but had nothing to add.
“Violet Jones,” Oona said. “Turns out Dobbs here remembers this girl, and we don’t, and neither one of us is happy about that.”
“Dobbs remembers Violet?” Annie asked.
“I do now,” he shouted.
Annie looked Oona in the eyes.
“How?”
“That’s a good question. Now we know this girl ain’t human, and we know she’s got the same technology you do, so you can imagine, once we figured out somebody was using the zombie frequency, that she was the first person we looked up. But she wasn’t home. What did she do to us?”
Annie was reeling. It still felt like the room was spinning, only it wasn’t her equilibrium that was the problem now, it was that reality itself was starting to come unhinged.
“You said, ‘zombie frequency’.”
“The signal we followed,” Laura said. “It’s the same one.”
“Answer the question,” Oona said.
“Yes, Violet was there, but I didn’t remove her from your memories. She did that herself. What do you mean you already checked her?”
“She wasn’t home,” Laura said. “And the signal wasn’t any stronger in Sorrow Falls.”
“Violet’s always home.”
“The farmhouse was empty,” Dobbs said. “I looked everywhere.”
“You didn’t look hard enough, Dobbs,” Annie said. “She has to be there somewhere.”
“What did she do to us?” Oona asked.
“I’ll explain later,” Annie said. “First, someone needs to get me a phone.”
Lieutenant Marcus Devlin missed Sorrow Falls more than he had expected.
Part of this was that he just didn’t like the Pentagon very much. Before his current station, he’d been assigned to the military base in Sorrow Falls. He was rotated out of there about seven months before things got really interesting, which was either great luck or horrible luck, depending.
He probably would have ended up dead, just statistically speaking, if he had still been there on the night of The Incident. That was how most of the soldiers ended up, including a decent number of friends. On the other hand, like everyone else, he spent his entire time there holding his breath in anticipation of something happening. He liked to think even if he didn’t make it, being there for it would have been sort of satisfying.
What he missed about Sorrow Falls was that life there was pretty simple, really. It was a nice, mostly outdoors assignment in a quiet New England farm town, which just wasn’t the sort of idyll Devlin expected to like as much as he did. It was a whole lot better than the urban blight of D.C., to say nothing of the harshly lit malice of the average windowless Pentagon corridor.
His current assignment was originally a form of remote support of the Sorrow Falls base, if ‘prepared to nuke the town in the event it came to that’ could be called support. He managed to luck out a second time in that regard, because on the night in which nuking the town became a real possibility, he was in the hospital, recovering from arthroscopic surgery on his right knee. If he had two good knees he would have been in the room that night, about to order a nuclear strike on a domestic target, and probably also talking to both the president and Annie Collins on the phone.
On the other hand, if he had two good knees he would have still been in Sorrow Falls, so it was probably for the best that he didn’t.
That phone call might have gone a little smoother if he’d been a part of it. This was not to say that the call went poorly, since it did end on a high note: the town wasn’t nuked. But Marcus Devlin knew who Annie Collins was, even if she didn’t know him. (Or rather, she likely wouldn’t remember meeting him.) If he’d been there, maybe that very important conversation would have been quicker and easier.
Or, maybe he was just annoyed at having missed out on that too. It wa
s pretty frustrating to look back on a career that was intrinsically connected to probably the most consequential series of events in the history of the country—perhaps even of humanity—but at the same time, to have missed out on all the big moments. It was like he’d been watching the greatest movie ever made, only he dozed off before the climax and woke up during the closing credits.
Wishing he’d been around to nearly bomb the East Coast was one of the stranger places his mind drifted in the course of fulfilling his current duties.
Devlin now worked for Team Babysitter.
In a way, it was the exact same job he had when he was in Sorrow Falls, and again when he was first reassigned to the Pentagon, once it became clear he couldn’t fulfill his duties without a new knee. The difference was that where he used to be in charge of watching a spaceship to see what it was going to do, now he watched a teenager who owned a spaceship, to see what she was going to do.
There were some other obvious differences. The ship was largely inscrutable. It didn’t move or talk, had no capacity for sarcasm, and didn’t appear to care if its privacy was being violated. It also didn’t attend college, or go on talk shows. It didn’t make off-the-cuff remarks that could negatively impact international relations. It didn’t perform evasive maneuvers just to impress its friends. And at no point in the three years the ship sat in that field did Devlin have to consult a team of developmental psychologists as part of a threat assessment.
In most regards, Devlin took it exactly as seriously as he was expected to, but privately he thought most of the job was somewhere between massively stupid and insanely funny. The high point was probably a fifty-page briefing on the importance of adjusting the nation’s threat levels to coincide with Annie Collins’ menstrual cycle. It was delivered by a young analyst who evidently had all trace of humor removed surgically, and who simply couldn’t understand why Marcus kept laughing at him.
Devlin thought he understood Annie pretty well. He understood the town that had created her, certainly, which was a lot like knowing her. This made him less likely to assume the worst about her and her intentions, which he was pretty sure made him good at his job.
There were mountains of speculative documents that insisted Annie’s interaction with the alien ship meant she was no longer entirely Annie Collins in any appreciable sense, but Marcus didn’t believe any of it. He’d read first-hand reports from the field, talked with her handlers, and spoken to her three or four times, and out of all of that he continued to believe she was fundamentally the same girl she’d been before The Incident.
Sometime around the midpoint of Annie’s second semester at Wainwright, it started to become clear to Devlin that he was the only one attached to Team Babysitter who felt this way.
There had always been the stray comment here and there. When you have a team of people whose sole responsibility is to collect and then relay information about one individual, you’re going to have the occasional off-color joke, expression of resentment, and so on.
The mild dislike of constant familiarity.
He’d gotten to know a lot of Secret Service agents while a part of the team, and was told that this sort of thing was normal. They guarded people 24/7 that they were under no professional obligation to also like, basically, and a lot of them did not like who they were guarding. At the Pentagon, hundreds of miles from Annie Collins, nobody was obligated to like her either, and their constant collection of minutiae virtually guaranteed a lot of them weren’t going to.
But then came Annie’s night in the observatory, and the off-color humor went from the occasional side-comment to daily patter, and then it turned into something that wasn’t even an attempt to be funny.
They were afraid of her.
It took a while for Lieutenant Devlin to even put that together. His opinion of Annie hadn’t changed much over the same period of time, and so he had no reason to think anybody else’s had. Sure, he was disappointed in her for maneuvering the ship just to impress a boy, and yes it was scary—he’d been there for this part—when the ship looked ready to fire a weapon because she had a nightmare. But it was definitely fear.
The command center for Team Babysitter was a large room that was once used for classified Soviet reconnaissance. There were multiple big-screen monitors devoted to every angle of the spaceship that was available from the surface, plus two from re-tasked satellites that were settled in a higher orbit. The rest of the room was taken up by a collection of computers with open communication channels to the teams in the field. On any given day, there were between five and fifteen people in the room, reviewing data, watching the ship, performing background checks on people identified through facial recognition software, or simply watching Annie for any signs of danger.
At 22:30, on the night of the Wainwright keg party, there were seven people in the room, including Devlin. He was there when they received word of the code red—meaning an imminent threat to Annie, something that hadn’t been declared once in two plus years—and he was there when the ship fired at the surface a minute later.
Two people in the room screamed, and a third—a man Devlin knew had seen combat—began crying. Yes, Devlin also found this development jarring, and frightening, but his reasons and theirs were pretty seriously different.
“She’s going to kill us all,” a woman named Barbara screamed. “I always knew this was going to happen.”
Barbara was a Pentagon lifer, a hard-assed army sergeant who’d just become a grandmother a few months earlier, and who routinely compared Annie to one of her nieces. She didn’t ‘always know’ any such thing.
“Everyone, work the situation,” Devlin said. “Reach her detail, find out why she fired.”
“You think they’re still alive?” Dave asked. Dave complained constantly about having to babysit, but he was good at his job until about thirty seconds before asking this question.
“We are assuming Annie Collins was defending herself, Dave. Now let’s find out why.”
Dave didn’t move.
“Dave. I mean, that’s an order. Do you need me to say that?”
Dave put a headset on, reluctantly, and started trying to reach the team on the ground.
“Can anyone get me a ground view of the impact?” Devlin asked.
That was the last command Lieutenant Devlin was able to make before the phones started ringing. He wasn’t even looking up when the ship fired for the second time, although he did hear Dave announcing loudly that he couldn’t reach the field team. The room was coming apart and it had only been a couple of minutes.
And the general was on the phone.
“We’re still waiting on information from the field,” Devlin told him.
General Calvin Perlmutter had been a personal friend for close to ten years. He was one of the sanest people Marcus Devlin had ever met. He sounded unhinged.
“Do you have her current location?” the general asked.
“We don’t have anything yet.”
“All right. We’re mobilizing. Put out the order.”
“Cal…”
“Don’t Cal me, lieutenant. I know you have a soft spot for this little child, but from what I’m looking at, she just declared war.”
“You are overreacting. Sir. We need more information.”
There was a long pause. Marcus had a bad feeling, that this wasn’t the good kind of long pause.
“Get her current location, Devlin. Find out how bad it is, and then we’ll talk about how to proceed, but understand that when the time comes if we have to put her down, we will put her down.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Now find out who on your team is closest to the situation. I believe we have Braver nearby, yes? She’ll be point in the field and we will be mobilizing. Is that clear?”
“Yes sir.”
They’re going to execute her, he thought, as he hung up the phone.
Annie had one number for Violet and about seven for Ed, and all of them were saved in the memory of the
cell phone she’d left in the dorm room. That was okay when it came to Violet, because Annie memorized it back before relying on the cell’s memory was a standard procedure. So, she used the burner phone Oona provided and dialed that number.
Violet wasn’t answering. Annie supposed there could be a benign explanation for this, but then struggled to come up with one. The problem was that Vi didn’t have a whole lot of things going on. She had no job, her non-existent parents didn’t make her turn off the phone at the dinner they didn’t eat, and she had nowhere to go where she might accidentally leave it behind. The fact that Annie was attempting to reach her friend after 11 PM could mean Violet was asleep, except Violet didn’t sleep.
It was maybe possible for Vi to not be home at the same time Oona drove up to her door, but that wouldn’t explain why Violet was also not answering her phone now.
Annie was trying not to jump to conclusions, but the disappearance of her friend coinciding with Dobbs remembering she existed pretty much had to be related. Annie needed more information.
First, though, she had to find Ed. He would know what to do. But she didn’t have any of Ed’s seven numbers memorized, so she had to use the ship.
Annie closed her eyes and formed an idea, in which she would be speaking to Ed by way of the telecommunications device in her hand. This probably looked weird, like she was communing with the spirit world or something, but there was no way to help that.
Once the idea was formed, Annie shared it with the spaceship.
The ship interacted with the idea, and changed it subtly. Then she and the ship were interpreting the results together, and this was how she found out where Ed was.
Ed Somerville was at a naval base in Connecticut. He arrived there at sundown, and Sam was with him. Annie got of this from a composite of images using visual equipment all over the base, and looking down from outer space, but that didn’t mean she saw any of it: nothing appeared before the eyeballs hidden behind her closed eyelids.
What actually happened was that the memory of having seen these things was added to her consciousness, even though it wasn’t originally her memory. Nor was it the ship’s memory, exactly.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 25
