He passed the Earth Unit, where operators at observation stations watched for smugglers attempting to reach the planet. Outside, he knew, there were forty more such stations, each dedicated to another primitive planet, to preventing it giving up its wealth of genes and souls to criminals intent on selling them to underground scientists, slavers, wealthy thrill seekers, and whomever else might want them, whether for experimentation or entertainment, or to build them into brilliant robots.
“I don’t want you to give her a baby.”
“I thought—”
She turned on him. “Remember who reads you.” Her voice was quiet, but her eyes were stunned with hurt. “Your feelings for her are agonizing to me.”
His heart opened to Diana, the real love of his life.
“You know it’s on mission. The baby is on mission.”
They turned a corner and headed for Diana’s private suite—their suite—where their marriage had been consummated, where they had chosen Earth work, where they had embraced for the last time before he began his tour.
In the middle of the large, comfortable room, Abby floated in an Isolate, her open eyes empty. The flickering lights of medical analysis touched her smooth skin.
Diana walked up to her. Gazing at her, she put her hands on her hips. “Incredible,” she said. “She looks like an angel.”
“A baby would endanger her? Is that why we’re here?”
As she floated there in perfect nakedness, shimmering with the blue light of the device that held her, he could almost believe that her soul, incredibly pure, had appeared on the surface of her body.
“She’s perfect,” Diana whispered.
“Then you understand.”
“It’s starting. On Earth.”
He felt an awful sinking of the heart, and yet with it came excitement. This was his work, why he was a policeman here and a policeman there.
“We’re married. We want a baby.”
She came to him and stood before him. Her face was flushed, her eyes fixed with anger. She drew back her right hand and slapped him hard.
Instinct almost caused him to strike back, but training stopped him—training and love. She turned away, plunged to her desk, and dropped down behind it. “I’m so sorry.” She shook her head. “Pardon my lack of professionalism.”
Diana didn’t have a baby with him; of course she was jealous. He felt it, too, the hollow cold truth that he might not come back. That his real wife might never bear their child.
“When I’m there,” he said carefully, “you know … ” He gestured vaguely. They could not take memories of Aeon with them. Undercover cops like him lived and worked in total amnesia. If they remembered themselves, they were vulnerable to an enemy that could read the mind.
She stood again and came to him.
He took her in his arms and felt as she pressed herself against him a rush of memory and a rush of love.
“You want the child?” she asked. Then, very softly, her voice a burr of misery. “With her?”
He held her more tightly. “I want our child.”
“No,” she said sharply. “Violation of the mission.” She gazed at him. “What’s it like?”
“When I’m there, I’m Flynn Carroll, wondering why the hell I’m giving up a billion-dollar ranch for a little, tiny police job.”
“Billion what? I’m sorry, I’m not tracking.”
“Their measure of wealth. The obscure corner of earthly life I happened to enter turned out to be incredibly wealthy.”
“I did not know that. So your life there must be very pleasant.”
“I gave it all up to be a cop. Nobody can figure me out. Frankly, neither can I. Not when I’m on Earth.”
She came to him, and when she drew close he felt in her embrace a haunting, beloved memory of Abby. He would never tell her this, though. Never.
“Love, do your best. I’ll have to watch every detail, remember that.”
He kissed her and felt her vulnerability and her anguish, and shared it.
She broke away then and went to the window. Sunrise was not far off, and the eastern sky was a strip of pink, one of the moons hanging there like a pearl.
“The Moon of Love,” she said. Then, bitterly, “Can a moon mock you?” She whirled around. “She’s a cover, nothing more. Which you seem to want to forget.”
“As I must. As you know.”
“She could be in danger.”
“I know it.”
“And the child.”
He knew that, too, and it made his guts crawl. What was worse, back on station, all of this would be forgotten. “What would you have me do, love?”
She went back to her desk, her place of authority. She had brought him here to warn him. Were there also orders? Her hands, fisted, lay before her. “Mission Control regards them as expendable.”
As far as the police department was concerned, Abby and the baby she and Flynn were going to have were a cover. They were bait.
“They will be taken,” she whispered. “Inevitably.”
Agony. Agony in his heart. But the whole human species and its chance to evolve and join the chorus of conscious species in the universe depended on this mission, and therefore on such sacrifices. He said, “I know.”
“I’m sorry I brought you here. I apologize.”
“You had to. We both know the regs. If I’m going operational, this is the only way to tell me.” His consciousness would forget, but not his deeper self. There, the hard, quick, brilliant police captain would remain hidden, waiting to take the lash to whatever smugglers presented themselves.
Hand in hand, they walked down to the transport, a formation known on Earth as a wormhole. Diana pressed their code into the heavy door and they entered the confined space of the transition chamber. The transport position shimmered before them, a darkness beyond the end of darkness. In this universe, there are many walls and many openings in those walls. On Earth, places that are closer than a hair seem more distant than the farthest star. Here, where the truth was known, such a traverse as this was just a short step, nothing more, but through a system that had taken a thousand years to create, a truly extraordinary triumph of the mind.
“Has she been sent?”
“She’s back. They’ve got her lying right where they found her. She’s just about to awaken.”
“I love you, my wife.”
Diana squeezed his hand.
He took a breath. He stepped forth, into the strange, empty coldness of the transport. There was the familiar hollow rush, then he staggered out into the night and the flowers of the Texas prairie.
She lay there, as pale as a cloud in the sea of white dots that covered the night prairie. Far to the east, Earth’s own moon was just rising.
He lay down beside her and gazed up at the strangely empty sky. Earth was an outlier, orbiting a star at the extreme edge of this galaxy.
As his memory faded, he clung for a last sorrowing moment to Diana. Then he turned to Abby. Her eyes were open, gazing into the sky.
His last memory of home winked out.
Abby said, “Flynn? Are you awake.”
“Mm?”
“It’s three. Three, Flynn!”
“How can it be three?” he said. He thought, We’ve been here half the night and I never did it.
“We must’ve been tired. Plus, WC took off. We’ve gotta double on Serena now.”
“Forget the horses.”
“We need to get home; what’ll your folks think?”
“That we’re out here being bad. Which we are.” He drew her to him … but as he felt her warmth and the curves of her, he also felt from deep in his heart something he did not expect and could not explain, which was a cold, gripping sorrow. It seemed like an echo from a long ago time, some tragedy that he had long forgotten, but that now returned to him, in this moment when new life was about to be made.
“You’re shivering,” she said.
He kissed her, and as he did, he entered her. “I w
as cold. Now I’m not.”
Their bodies crossed a bridge of stars, the stars of hope, the stars of new life, the stars of the miracle that is mankind.
When they were done, they lay back side by side. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. She turned and clung to him.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“I love being naked with you like this.”
“Well, I’m cold.”
He got his windbreaker, which lay beside them, and put it over her. He stared up into the stars.
“I wonder if there’s anybody up there,” he said.
“God, I guess. Somewhere.” She took his hand and laid it on her belly. “Somebody in here,” she said.
“We can’t be sure.”
“I felt it. I felt the exact moment.”
He lay there in wonder not only at the beauty of his wife amid the stars and the flowers, but at the mystery of life itself, and the new life that she seemed so sure now lay within her.
As the moon cleared the eastern horizon, they mounted Serena, Flynn sitting behind Abby and holding her around the waist. He leaned against her, inhaling the straw-sweet scent of her hair, pressing tight against her softness and her warmth. Gently, quickly, he kissed her neck. She giggled, a happy music.
Something inside him seemed to call to him, the voice of some unknown observer, stern and deeply sad. “Danger,” the voice said, and was gone.
But there was no danger, not here in this familiar place.
They let the horse walk as slowly as she wanted, through the bright moon shadows.
On this perfect night, the world was wonderful.
“I’m happy,” he said.
“Then why do you sound sad?”
“I’m not. Far from it.”
As they rode, Flynn became aware of tears drifting down his cheeks. Drifting at first, then pouring. It was as if somebody he could not see, who lived inside him, was experiencing this lovely night as a tragedy. They rode on toward the distant lights of the house, and the whispered warning faded, and then the sadness.
Flynn kissed her neck again, and she arched her head and reached back and laid a hand on his cheek.
They unsaddled Serena and WC, who they found predictably standing at the barn door. Hand in hand, they crossed to the silent house and crept up the back stairs to Flynn’s boyhood room. On the way, Abby tickled him and they stifled laughter, and in his own he heard once again that mysterious note of sadness.
The night passed, stepping softly into dawn, and they came downstairs to a sizzling ranch breakfast. Flynn’s mother and father twinkled at them, but nothing was said of the late hour of their return.
On distant Aeon, Diana wept for the man she loved, working tirelessly to protect him and his earthly wife and their coming child.
Or was she protecting them from Mission Control’s plan, which was to use them as bait? Other eyes saw, other, darker minds wondered just who this seemingly innocent man might really be, and drew closer, and looked closer.
And then they knew.
Another deep-cover cop had been exposed—or rather, a subtle trap in which he and his earthly wife were the bait had been sprung. Soon the criminal band that was now evaluating Earth would conclude that he was indeed a policeman from Aeon and take steps to neutralize him.
By so doing, they would reveal themselves, the long game would grow shorter, and, if all went well, they’d be mopped up and the people of Earth would be left alone for a little while longer.
Over the next weeks and months, the movements of Abby and Flynn were observed, their associations researched, their every breath and every heartbeat recorded, along with the heartbeat of the infant sleeping within.
In a world so far away its home star could not even be seen from Earth, Abby and her infant came up for sale in an auction room that somebody from Earth would have seen as a sort of heaven, palatial and blue.
It was not a heaven. It was a place where souls were bartered, as evil a place as exists.
Figures watched her terror, just as butchers on Earth watch the terror of cattle, and with as little emotion. Others discussed her genes and the baby’s rich stem cells.
The bidding was quick, just a gesture here, a nod there. In the end, the two of them went for a sum large enough to satisfy even the greediest smuggler.
They would be broken up for their DNA. Probably.
On the day that she was sold, Abby, all unawares, made Flynn a chocolate pie. On her belly, there was a mark, red and hardly sore at all, where a long needle had been inserted. The infant, rich with new cells, was now labeled, as was the mother.
They were free Americans on one planet, property on another.
All was done, then, but for the waiting.
Late some nights, a car would drift past the house. Far away, Diana would watch it and wonder. Who was in it? Why were they there? Was it from Mission Control, perhaps some part of it she did not have access to? Or was it something else entirely—a sign, perhaps, that the trap was working?
The car was followed, but went nowhere important. Abby and Flynn lived their lives and slept their sleep, and the world rolled on.
Not forever, though, and not for long. Their life together soon would end, and his life alone would begin, and with it the quest that would come to define him, to find the woman he loved, to rescue her, to return her to their house of perfect love.
Diana would watch and weep inside for the husband who had forgotten her, but she would continue to serve the mission, duty before love.
In the great vastness of the universe, worlds begin and end every day. Somewhere eyes are being raised to the sky for the first time and somewhere for the last time, always. But in the heart, in the house of love, tiny events are enormous events, such as the loss of the one you love.
Flynn lost Abby and Diana lost Flynn, and the universe went its heedless way. But not for them, for them the losses were so vast that they were almost unimaginable.
Duty kept Diana loyal to the mission, and she tried not to hate the man she loved, watching him search for this other woman, this simple human creature who, after all, had been nothing but a bit of bait. That, and her own husband’s new and eternal love.
Praise
“Excellent storytelling will keep readers guessing until the very end.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Pulse-pounding action and a perplexing puzzle but most of all Hunters has real feeling—a heart as big as the Ritz.”
—Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of The Kraken Project
“Hunters engages you immediately and then surprises you on every page, taking the story to places I could never anticipate…. Strieber’s skills at creating complicated, interesting characters have never been better displayed.”
—Larry Bond, New York Times bestselling author of Lash-Up
“Whitley Strieber knows how to scare us. Now he’s taken his own frightening experiences documented in his bestseller Communion and built them into a compelling, must-read cops-and-aliens detective series.”
—William J. Birnes, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Day After Roswell
“If Stephen King teamed up with Lee Child, they couldn’t write a novel to match Hunters. Filled with high-tension suspense, blood-tingling chills and sizzling passion, Hunters is more than just a novel—it is the story Strieber was born to write.”
—David Hagberg, New York Times bestselling author of The Fourth Horseman
“Scary, suspenseful, shocking, thrilling … Strieber’s a master of suspense and the undisputed master of the we-are-not-alone thriller, and in Hunters he proves it yet again.”
—William Martin, New York Times bestselling author of The Lincoln Letter
ALSO BY WHITLEY STRIEBER
FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
Majestic
The Wild
The Grays
2012: The War for Souls
Critical Mass
Hybrids
The Omega Point
Alien Hunter: Underworld
Alien Hunter: The White House*
*Forthcoming
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WHITLEY STRIEBER is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-five books, including the legendary bestsellers The Wolfen, The Hunger, Communion, and Superstorm, all the bases of movies.
His book The Grays is also being made into a film. His website, Unknowncountry.com, is the largest of its kind in the world, exploring the edge of science and reality. You can learn more about Whitley’s books at www.strieber.com and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. You can sign up for author updates here.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
Hunters Page 30
