It was difficult to explain.
There were no memories to be had regarding what took place once Ed and Sam entered the base proper—she could get them, but it was more complicated, because it meant gathering info from human minds. She usually told the ship to stick to electronic devices on this kind of search.
Annie worked backwards instead, directing the idea of communicating with them in a new direction. She wanted to understand where they were coming from. That triggered a flood of information about a trip to Latvia, and an abandoned radio telescope in the woods, and Sam… shooting someone?
She didn’t get a memory of Sam committing an act of murder. What came through was the record of a conversation Ed had with a woman named Mel, in which Ed stated that this happened. It could have been something that didn’t actually happen, only that it was something Ed said happened. That was different.
It wasn’t the kind of thing Ed would make up, though, and the fact that he suddenly needed an escape route out of a foreign nation certainly reinforced the truthfulness of it.
“Any luck?” Cora asked.
She had been watching Annie for a little while, apparently. Annie was somewhat used to this, since it was essentially Cora’s job.
“A little,” Annie said. “How long’s it been?”
“Your eyes have been closed for about for ten minutes,” Cora said.
“Violet didn’t answer. I, um, I used the telephone to try and reach her, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but then you went away.”
“Sorry.”
“Are you talking to the ship?” Lindsey asked, quietly. Annie kind of wanted to ask if they could drop her off somewhere, but she had a feeling whether she wanted it or not, Lindsey was in for the long haul now. However long that was.
“Yeah.” To Cora, Annie said, “I’m trying to reach Ed Somerville. It looks like he’s being held at a military base.”
“Under arrest?”
“Not sure. If it was just a matter of talking on the phone we’d be talking on the phone. Shippie didn’t give me that right off, though. I think there might be some risk.”
The trailer rocked as it eased into a turn.
“Where are we?” Annie asked.
Oona and Laura were up at the cab, taking turns telling Dobbs how to drive.
“We’re at the highway now,” Laura answered. “Heading north.”
“The Maine woods,” Oona added. “Safest place for us until we can figure this thing out. Be drivin’ all night, and they probably won’t let us get all the way there, but we’re gonna give it a try. Are you all done with your calls?”
“No,” Annie said. “And head for Sorrow Falls.”
“That’s where they’ll expect us, girl.”
“Doesn’t matter. We have to find Violet.”
Oona rolled her eyes, but nodded.
Annie went back to the idea of reaching Ed, but nothing was popping up as a decent option. They’d either taken away his phone or he had turned it off. This seemed like a bad sign.
She would have to find another way to get word to him.
The MPs didn’t take anything away, which was nice of them. Ed was allowed to keep his bag—which still had the log books from the Latvian station, and all his notes—and his cell phone. The latter Ed had turned off on his way from Mel to the room they were being held in. He knew this was the best way for Annie to reach him, but he also knew that everyone in the government knew this. No call taken on his phone would be private for the foreseeable future.
Sam didn’t have anything to confiscate.
“We can’t just sit here,” Sam said, just as soon as the lock engaged on the door.
“What do you want to do, fight your way out?” Ed asked.
“Sure.”
Ed had no doubt Sam would do exactly that at the first opportunity. It was a useful sentiment, but premature. They needed to understand much more first.
“Sit down, let’s work this out,” Ed said.
The room they had been placed in was a few bars on the window away from being a prison cell. It had a bunk bed, a small table, and a toilet in the corner. After they were led in, and the door was closed, a lock engaged electronically. There was a panel next to the door with a keypad. If they wanted to exit they would have to enter a password they didn’t have.
Ed took the log books out and put them on the table.
“Not those again,” Sam said. “You’ve been staring at them for a week. What makes you think you’re going to figure it out now?”
“I have more information now.”
“Did you learn Latvian and Russian in the past few minutes?”
“No, but maybe I just need another set of eyes.”
Ed flipped to a blank page and pulled out a pen. On the page, he wrote, they can hear us.
“Here, what do you think of this?” he asked Sam, pointing to the message.
“Yeah, I agree,” Sam said. “But that doesn’t change anything.”
Sam took the pen, and wrote, do you believe them? Did A do all this?
Ed shook his head, and wrote, Violet could have.
Why? Sam wrote.
“Don’t know,” Ed said.
Sam stepped away from the table and started walking around the edges of the room. It was a pretty small space. If Ed hadn’t already spent time with Sam on board a submarine, he might consider this almost claustrophobically small.
He realized Sam was looking for a camera.
“Hey,” Sam said, returning to the table, “Show me that again.”
Ed flipped through another log book as if he was doing exactly that, while Sam grabbed the pen, and started writing: 7, 4, 1, 6, 6… 7, 4, 1, 6, 6.”
“What?” Ed asked, quietly.
Sam pointed at the pad next to the door.
There was a red light on the top of the panel. From prior experience, Ed knew that the red light was supposed to be solid until the correct code was entered, at which point it would turn green. It was now blinking red, which was something new.
The blinking was non-random. Seven blinks, then a pause, then four and a pause, and so on. It was the pattern Sam jotted down.
It’s the password, Sam wrote. Ed nodded.
Then something interesting happened: as soon as it finished the last iteration—the second six—it started on a new series of flashes.
“Morse,” Ed said.
“Shh.”
Ed didn’t know Morse code. Sam, who was a literal boy scout at one time in his life, did.
Sam watched it go through two cycles before writing anything down.
11:35, open door. Exit to right. Jeep outside. Go home. It was self-defense.
Ed looked at the message, and realized that Annie—or rather, the ship—only sent it after they’d both received the first message.
Of course, he thought.
“I’m such an idiot,” Ed said.
“What?”
“You were right, Sam. I should have seen it.”
He started closing up the log books and putting them back into the bag. They had only four minutes.
“I don’t understand,” Sam said. “Did you figure something out?”
“I think so.”
“Something… good?”
“No, probably not.”
18
The Backroads Less Traveled
I only have time for a short statement.
At roughly 10:30 this evening, and again at 10:42, two events took place on and near the campus of Wainwright College in Turnbull. These events appear to have been attacks involving a weapon fired from outer space. We also have unconfirmed reports of gunshots in the area.
…At this time, we do not know who was the target of these attacks, or whether they were successful. We do not, at present, have any fatalities to report, but as many as twenty were injured. The severity of these injuries is not known at this time.
We do not know if there will be any additional attacks.
We are evacuatin
g a ten-block area around the epicenter. We urge all civilians in the metropolitan area… if you are home, stay where you are. If you are out, find a safe place and remain there. We will update you when it is safe.
We are treating this as an act of terrorism…
Official statement, Superintendent of Massachusetts state police
The most direct route from the Wainwright campus to Sorrow Falls took about ninety minutes, in light traffic, going the speed limit. This assumed there was such a thing as light traffic, and also presumed the absence of road blocks and other forms of law forces intervention. To the former point, the best path used Route 128 northbound, before connecting with Route 2 westbound.
There were very few times in history in which traffic along 128 could be called light, but at least the northbound side was three lanes between the Turnbull on-ramp and the Route 2 off-ramp, so there was some degree of maneuverability. Route 2, on the other hand, was either one or two lanes wide, depending.
Neither highway was optimal when driving possibly the most conspicuous vehicle in the entire state of Massachusetts. Worse, because of all the armor plating, it could barely get to 55 MPH.
This was something Oona spent a lot of time complaining about, once they really got moving.
“I told you we should have swapped out the engine,” she said to Laura, for the ninth or tenth time.
She was saying this from the driver’s seat. Once they’d gotten onto 128 proper, and put at least a few miles between them and the Turnbull exit, they pulled over at a gas station, switched drivers, and dropped all of Cora’s electronics into the flatbed of a truck.
Switching seats freed up Dobbs, so he could greet Annie properly, and explain how all of this had come to pass.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Annie decided, after Dobbs’ revelation that he met men with some kind of magical power to unlock the memory of Violet Jones.
“I agree,” Dobbs said.
It looked like he’d lost some weight, and he had a tan. Being a semi-celebrity agreed with him more than he let on.
“As soon as I remembered her,” he continued, “I reached out to these guys to see if I was the only one who’d forgotten. They’re kind of hard to just call up, but I knew where they were staying.”
“We didn’t know who she was,” Laura said.
“Still don’t,” Oona added, from the front.
“All right,” Annie said. She put her head in her hands and started rubbing her eyes. The adrenaline, beer, and whatever residual caffeine that was keeping her going was all running out at the same time. “All right, this is crazy. You guys, there’s no way Dobbs should remember Violet, it’s not supposed to be possible.”
“Excuse me,” Lindsey said. She had raised her hand, as if in class. “I know, like, everything about all of you, and I never heard of this person.”
“Yeah, so, don’t put this on your website, but Violet’s an alien.”
“She got in our heads and took herself out,” Oona barked. She had a way of expressing dissatisfaction that made it sound like she was about to shoot somebody even when she didn’t have a gun in her hands.
“It’s less intrusive,” Annie said, “but it’s almost like that. Basically, she makes it so you can’t form long-term memories of her. At least, that’s how she always explained it to me. I never thought of it as memories that were buried; I thought they didn’t exist. But if Dobbs remembers her now, that was obviously not the case. I wonder if Violet knows about this.”
“That could be why she ran off,” Laura said.
Annie wasn’t convinced Violet had done any such thing, and wouldn’t be until she saw it for herself. Vi wouldn’t leave her alone like that.
“And there’s this signal you think I’m responsible for,” Annie said.
“The last thing to broadcast on that frequency was the spaceship,” Laura said, “that’s why we said it had to be either you or… or Violet.”
“I don’t think it’s you,” Lindsey said.
Dobbs looked as if he’d just noticed Lindsey and Cora for the first time.
“Hi, you are?”
“I’m… Canny Ollins. Or Lindsey.”
“Okay. Cool.”
“You’re saying there’s some kind of subsonic signal out there, right?” Lindsey asked.
“Yes, and we thought Annie was the one using it.”
“Intentionally or not,” Laura added.
“Think I’m making a new batch of zombies, Dobbs?” Annie asked.
It was a joke, but his expression belonged to a man who didn’t think that was funny, and did think that was a real possibility.
“I have an idea,” Lindsey said.
“Honey,” Oona interrupted. She sounded a little distressed. “We got a chopper.”
Laura jumped to her feet and scaled the ladder to the roof hatch, and took a quick look.
“You’re right,” she said, closing the hatch quickly. “Think it’s looking for us?”
“We just shot up a school, so probably. What do you wanna do about this? Can we blast it out of the sky?”
“Do you guys have anti-aircraft guns on this thing?” Dobbs asked. It seemed unlikely, but not entirely impossible.
“I didn’t mean us, Dobbs,” Oona said. “Annie?”
“I don’t think I can do that,” she said.
“Can’t or won’t? Seems right in your wheelhouse.”
“They’re just doing their jobs. I don’t want to kill anybody.”
“We’ve paddled down this river before, kid,” Oona said. “We’re square in the middle of an us/them problem here. I appreciate the moral quandary, but this may just be something you gotta resolve sooner rather than later. Baby, get up on that ladder again, we’re coming up on the turn.”
Laura climbed back up, and everyone held their breath as the trailer committed to the 270-degree turn that took them onto Route 2.
“It’s not following,” Laura said, after a few seconds. “It’s still going north.”
“That’s good,” Dobbs said.
“Yeah,” Oona said. She looked up in the rearview mirror, and met Annie’s eyes. “Yeah, that’s good. Looks like we’re past that little moral problem, girl. Don’t think it won’t come up again.”
Annie nodded.
There were at least four Secret Service agents who could have provided a decent description of the getaway camper. That they had not done so could have been because Annie’s attack on the van fried all of their communications equipment.
It could also mean that they were all dead. In Oona’s world, that would have been a preferable outcome.
“Let me find out what they know,” Annie said. “Maybe we can just avoid everyone.”
“With the ship?” Dobbs said. “That’s a good idea.”
“Yeah. Give me a minute.”
Annie started putting together an idea of what it would be like to know everything law enforcement knew about the past hour. This was another kind of thing that was really hard to explain to someone who couldn’t experience it directly.
Information had its own network.
There was the kind of data that was stored in computers, and she had access to all of that, but that was just a piece of it. People had ideas, and those ideas existed on the network too. Some days Annie thought of it as a shared wavelength, and on the two or three occasions in which she felt compelled to explain it, that was what she reached for. It wasn’t really accurate, though.
It was more like a field from quantum theory, or the membranes from brane theory, which she liked even better. Ideas—and the data stored in them—lived on a shared membrane. Most of the time, people had access to local ideas only, but sometimes they were shared.
The membrane was a much more powerful place to mine for answers. It had all of the things stored in all of the computers, but also touched every mind that accessed those computers. And the ship tapped directly into that membrane.
The idea she was forming, then, was one in which all
of the information available—what was being communicated through public and private networks, either on the open Internet or along secured government channels—and all of the information of every person with an idea of what had happened on the Wainwright campus, was put together to form a complete picture.
She was about to push this idea to the ship, when someone stopped her.
“Don’t do that,” Rick Horton said.
Annie opened eyes she didn’t even realize she’d closed. He was standing at the front of the cabin, near the door.
“Hey,” Annie said, looking around the cabin. “Crazy question, I know, but does anyone else see someone standing near the door right now?”
It came as little surprise that the city of Turnbull was ill-prepared for an attack from space. It wasn’t the sort of thing the city’s first responders game-planned, even after it became clear that Annie Collins was going to be staying within the city limits.
This made things difficult, for while the dispatchers knew enough to not send every last emergency vehicle in the area to the same one-block scene, communications became sufficiently muddled that this was essentially what happened.
Hysteria was another real issue. A few people happened to be looking in the right direction to see the first ‘bolt’ strike, and those few—along with any friends who might have missed it—were still looking in the same direction when the second one landed. They all knew it wasn’t lightning, even though that was the obvious thing. Most people at one time in their lives had happened to be looking skyward at a moment in which a lightning bolt arced between the clouds and the earth, and there was a common understanding of what that kind of thing was supposed to look like. This was not that. This was straight. It was not a meandering energetic force striking a random location. It was a targeted event. It was a weapon.
The 911 call center was overloaded almost immediately, and if such a thing as ‘overloaded’ could be used to describe the Internet, then that happened too. Two blasts from space became ‘multiple’ blasts, and then it was described as ‘ongoing’, and then it started sounding like the whole city was actively under attack. There were reports of zombies, and nobody knew whether to take them seriously. There were also reports of new alien spaceships landing all over town: the armada had finally arrived, apparently.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 26
