“I want to start showing you the weapons systems,” Nani’s voice broke what had been a long stretch of silent contemplation. After their brief letting go, after the tear fall, both girls discharging pent-up emotions, they’d settled slowly into the waiting game. Nani hadn’t been hunched over the controls for some time and all at once Bianca realized just how much she’d been at them before. It felt odd to see her just sitting there, leaned back, staring into space.
She wondered just what sorts of things the brilliant scientist thought of in those quiet moments.
She herself hadn’t had a coherent thought in what felt like forever.
Nani looked straight up, finishing her sentence after a long pause: “In case we have to fight our way out of here.” She gazed out the domed screen, piercing the clouds. As if spying the danger lurking above. “We should be prepared.”
Bianca nodded. She was fried. The emotions of the last however-many days had her burnt. First the build-up to the events at the club in Spain, then the loss of Jess, then the frantic search, then almost finding her, or at least finding evidence—right as the Kel arrived. Leading right to a run for their lives and, finally, here. Hiding in the clouds of Jupiter.
Oddly, she could still barely believe any of it was happening.
“This whole situation is completely unreal,” she made the comment absently. “Everything we’ve been through so far. Now I’m sitting in a frickin starship, in the clouds of Jupiter, with a human from a complete other planet. I feel so normal yet … it’s all so completely, completely not normal.”
Nani agreed. “Until not too long ago I’d never been off my world either. To you I’m an alien, but then you’re an alien to me. And all this,” she gazed around the breadth of the dome, at the murky depths without, “all this is just as unreal to me as it is to you.”
Her voice dropped in volume.
“I should’ve just sided with her,” she mused, still staring up and out.
“With who?”
“Satori. When she wanted to go back to Anitra, I should’ve just gone. At least then Jessica and Zac would be safe.”
Bianca shook her head. “It wouldn’t change the invasion. The Kel still would’ve come. We just wouldn’t have been here. My world would still be invaded.”
Nani shrugged. “Maybe I should’ve just said No back in the lab.”
“Then Zac would be dead. And the Kel still would’ve retrieved the Icon.”
“I mean No the first time Jessica asked. Before the starship. When she came to get the Icon to give to Zac. I shouldn’t have let her have it.”
“Then Zac would still be dead, probably, and Kang would’ve overrun Anitra.”
Nani inhaled.
“I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Bianca shook her head. “We can’t regret any of that. Anything we’ve done.”
Another long moment passed. Nani continued looking out the screen above, through the dark, swirling clouds.
At some point she mused quietly: “I guess I’ll never get to try waffles.”
Bianca looked across at her.
“Waffles?”
“I don’t know. You mentioned them. When Zac and Jess were down there. Eating breakfast. They sound really good. I keep thinking about them. In these quiet moments.” She made eye contact. “Weird, right?”
It wasn’t. Not at all.
“Anyway. Now it doesn’t look like I’ll ever get to try them.”
Bianca stared at her. Tried to imagine that was true. That there would never, ever again be waffles.
And though she’d been sitting there thinking of the end of all she knew; family, friends, home—somehow none of that fully impinged. Not fully, one-hundred percent. Somehow, though she’d thought it, though she’d said it … she hadn’t yet accepted, really accepted, the fact that the Earth was over. Done for.
History.
Now it hit her.
And all at once the silly notion of that, of never getting to have waffles—never, ever again having an Earth-made waffle—slammed everything home.
And with it the unreal situation became suddenly very, very real. It gripped her like nothing had so far.
The Earth as she knew it was over.
It’s over.
Rather than weep, however, as she first thought she might, she felt an unexpected surge of determination.
She wanted no part of an existence with no waffles.
“We’ll get waffles,” she said, confidence in her voice. I’m not gonna let the Kel win this.
There would be a way. There must be a way. As long as they were alive there had to be a way. Sitting on the quiet, comfortable bridge of the Reaver it was easy to feel confident. Easy to feel hope. To let it surge and let herself feel they actually could turn this around. And so she let the feeling run its course. To the absurd, maybe, but she began to feel invincible.
Nani sighed. “If there’s anything we can learn from Jessica it’s not to give up. The amount of impossible things she made it through, all the things she accomplished …” Neither of them said anything of the fact that Jess was now lost. Maybe even dead. After all that, after everything amazing Jess did do, after everything she pulled off … her run was over. Bianca pushed those thoughts aside, not wanting to lose this newfound sense of potential beneath a fresh, crushing wave of hopelessness. Jess could very well be gone forever, and as the wave continued to rise in her troubled mind, despite her effort to turn away from it, Nani, thankfully, kept talking.
“We’d heard about her, of course,” she said. “Those of us involved with the Reaver group. Jessica. Girl From the Other Side. We knew everything no one else did. Specifically that the Icon could quite probably make the drives work. A whole army had been sent across the ocean to invade the Dominion, a near suicide mission, all to cover the real intent, which was merely to steal it. Their Holy Relic. That’s when Jessica showed up.
“Zac brought her. He’d been enlisted through his wife, made an agent to our cause. We used his strength in a shock move to retrieve the Icon from its highly secure holding area. The army was there to receive it, a fail-safe, their stated purpose to deal a huge blow to Dominion morale, to make them weak. But that was really just a side benefit. Only we knew better. No one questioned that motivation or the value of doing it.
“We wanted the device to complete all this we’d been working on.” She looked around the formidable bridge. Her team truly had achieved the remarkable. And it worked. The thousand-year-old starship had been brought to life and now, with the info from the devices, flown to two different star systems.
“Then we heard the news,” Nani went on. “That the entire Dominion leadership had been killed and, impossibly, their greatest installation, the Crucible, the place where they made the mysterious Kazerai like Zac, was destroyed. We couldn’t believe it.
“Then, in the shock of the aftermath, the real picture. How Jess came and who she was. That Zac had used the Icon, gone to another world and come back with her. And that she had then been the one that did all that. Spawned the attack that brought down the Crucible and crippled the Dominion. And that, in the end, she used the Icon to return home. The one thing we wanted to get out of this, and it was gone.
“It was bitter-sweet. You can imagine. So much was achieved. So much more than we ever planned. From the point of view of the people, of the army, Jessica was a hero. This angel from another world. The results of what she did were cause for celebrations. She’d given us that final push that nearly brought the Dominion to their knees.
“And yet for those few of us who knew the truth, we’d won the battle but lost the war. We in the Reaver group knew the opportunity that was lost. Only we knew what it meant for the Icon to be gone from this world. No one else understood. No one else could.” Nani had fallen into a sort of mild rapture. “But many of us—not Lindin and his crew, of course; they were furious—but many of us were in awe of Jessica. As more information became known, as small legends began to arise, we could
scarcely believe it.
“Then when we got word she was back, this last time, that she’d come back with the Icon—with two Icons—we, us scientists, believed she might actually be a savior as the fanatics claimed. Can you believe it?” She looked at Bianca as if she felt proud to have considered such a silly notion. “Scientists, believing in prophecy?
“When I saw you guys for the first time I have to admit I was more thrilled than I let on.”
“You mean when you saw Jessica.”
“Both of you.”
“Why me? I’ve never done anything.”
Nani shrugged. “You were from Earth.” Of a sudden she seemed a tad uncomfortable and Bianca became intrigued. “I just got a sense you were special too.”
Bianca made a little noise and looked away.
“But was I wrong?” asked Nani. “Look. Look at what you’ve done. Look what we’ve all done.”
It was true, of course.
Bianca sat up straighter.
Ready to move on.
“So what about these weapons systems?”
Nani inhaled and cleared her head.
“This thing is loaded,” she said. “The Reaver is a warship.”
“So she’s packing heat.” Bianca half expected Nani to question the reference, but she didn’t.
Instead she agreed. “She’s definitely packing heat.”
CHAPTER 12: AN AUDIENCE WITH ALIENS
Newscasts were buzzing with the latest feeds. Watching them aboard the Bok jet was a frustrating affair. The TV kept blanking out with the No Signal message, throwing random interruptions into the stream of information—then cutting back in the middle of sentences or at the end of videos, blanking out again right as key moments were revealed. But the same info kept repeating and, after an hour or so, sitting rapt before the screen in that leather-upholstered luxury cabin, Hansel and Lorenzo had absorbed the entire picture. At least what was known by the world’s media.
In short the aliens were coming.
Or had at least agreed to meet with the President of the United States. From reports that request, that ballsy move by the Americans—usurping without question or consultation the role of decision-maker for the rest of the world—had everyone else in an uproar. As if the threat of alien invasion and all-out war weren’t enough, suddenly the people of Earth were yelling at each other over who should lead.
Such petty differences, thought Hansel. Sadly, and apparently, that ingrained posturing wasn’t changing even in the face of certain annihilation.
But what was done was done. The President had taken it upon himself to contact the Kel directly, frustrated—as were they all—and, not surprisingly, the Kel took the call. Brief though it was that conversation had already gotten wide airplay. Surely to the frustration of the Americans. Now an alien craft was being sent—any moment was the prevailing belief—to bring the President and his hastily assembled team of advisors into orbit to face the Kel directly, and the newscasts were covering the developing story from every possible angle.
Perhaps causing as much of an outcry as the call itself was the creature the President ended up talking to. A beast. Not Voltan, though Voltan was there and spoke at the end. Some sort of … henchman. A pet or something. Whatever it was it was definitely not anything like the aliens.
Almost like a yellow devil.
Nonetheless the specter of that bizarre monster—speaking English on top of everything else—did little to quell the turmoil of the real issue.
The world was furious at what the Americans had done.
What right did they have? To decide for them all? Hansel had to agree, in principle at least, but overall … When you got right down to it the Americans were probably the most even-keeled. A balance of will and the refusal to bend, combined with a desire to negotiate and the intelligence to be reasonable. Better than many of the world’s leaders. The other babies that ran the nations of Earth would either be too weak, too uncertain, or over the top with fiery rhetoric and ridiculous demands.
Yes, the Americans were the best choice.
Not that it probably mattered. The end was near, and beside Hansel in the small jet Lorenzo was already plotting how to profit by it. Part of Hansel, the human part, hated that treacherous scheming. That Lorenzo would be concerned only with his fellow Bok, as if they were truly different somehow, so willing to cast the rest of humanity to the wolves. It made Hansel’s skin crawl. To be sitting there, confined in such a small space with such a pitiless, evil man.
Yet, Lorenzo was also a powerful man. Evil, yes, a megalomaniac no doubt but … there was a certain validity to his claim. He did possess bizarre abilities, there was no question of it. Uncanny knowledge, vast reach. As the leader of a thousand-year-old secret society—founded on arcane knowledge of which the rest of the world had hardly a clue—Lorenzo had his hands deep in the machinery of Earth. Even now he’d been pumping his connections—as much as possible in the current chaotic climate—gathering more understanding than was being spewed over the networks for mass consumption. As a result Lorenzo had a fair idea of exactly what the hell was going on.
And he intended to capitalize on it.
And so the other part, the survivalist in Hansel, perhaps, felt a small bit of intrigue to be sitting there in that small, expensive, fast plane with this man, racing toward one of their key bases in Istanbul.
“There they are,” Lorenzo said in hushed awe, eyes glued to the TV. Hansel had been lax over the last several minutes, eyes roving away from the screen, out the windows at the ground scrolling in a blur beneath them. They were flying low, just a few thousand feet above the ground—well below usual altitudes—the pilot on it full throttle—probably 600 knots if Hansel had to guess. Moving fast. Hansel found himself fascinated as their shadow blitzed across features in the terrain, dark outline of the plane rolling up and down, stretching and compressing, buildings and other things near enough to make out in some detail, whipping beneath them at a fantastic rate.
At Lorenzo’s comment he turned from the window back to the TV, alarmed at once with what he saw. The video coming across was a live feed of one of the alien craft, captured by an unsteady cameraman—probably the first to spot its descent and call it in—the giant ship tacking slowly across the sky and descending. There had been no announcement from the aliens as to when or how they would show up, just that they would and where.
Now they’d arrived.
Hansel leaned closer. The starship was all black and looked heavy. Very, very heavy. Not some wispy, silvery UFO. A dark monster, materializing through a low bank of clouds as it dropped, heading directly for the DC Mall. Lorenzo, too, leaned forward, absorbing its every detail. Closer it came, steadily, unwavering, the cameraman running the zoom in and out, working to keep the giant in frame as he stumbled about. It cast a wide shadow, even on that cloudy day, and Hansel estimated it to be several hundred feet long. Slower it came, closer, throwing off no destructive blast, no powerful rockets one would’ve expected to hold something so massive in the air. No fiery engines thrashed the ground beneath. No hammering thrust pulverized the monuments and the grass and the roads and the cars.
Nothing. Just a shimmering wave, visible beneath it on the video as little more than a warble. Somehow the man holding the camera had been in the exact right place at the exact right time and the thing was coming directly for him. Right to the area where he’d been waiting. Excited he began running toward it, as cameramen had the compulsion to do, it seemed, to run into the thick of things in order to get the best possible shot. An automatic response, thought Hansel, shaking his head at the foolish effort. There would be no reward for this. No camera-man Emmy waited at some future gala. The impulse was still there, though, whatever drove that instinct, and on the man ran, shouting as he did, hauling up right beneath the beast and pointing up as it descended.
Idiot.
Yet Hansel was glad for his sacrifice. If there were other cameras to cut to this broadcaster chose not to use them
. This one was perfect.
Down the craft came. Then, near the ground, probably less than a hundred feet above the intrepid cameraman, looming impossibly heavy in the air, filling the lens, the bottom split open and giant struts unfolded. Hinged and sturdy legs, made of the same obsidian black metal as the rest of the ship.
Landing gear.
They locked into place.
**
Drake stared in open awe at the black behemoth settling over the Washington Mall. He’d rushed to DC, been the center of attention through several high-level meetings and now stood in a secure location overlooking that iconic stretch of lawn, in a room with some of the most powerful men in the world—including the President himself—waiting with growing uncertainty on this very moment. Now it was upon them.
They’d known only to expect an arrival; that the alien Kel were coming for them, return trip guaranteed. Drake continued to be the center of conversation, being the senior expert on all things fantastic—and things could not have been more fantastic—and he had been in the midst of yet another explanation of what little he knew of the Kel when the starship arrived. Now he was no longer the one they were paying attention to. Now all eyes were locked out the window, a hush upon the room.
There was no noise with the craft’s arrival. Maybe a deep throb, or a hum. Tangible but barely, like a wave pulse that was expending great energy yet was so far below human perception it could hardly be perceived. There should’ve been noise. Great volumes of terrific, head-crushing noise. Something that big—now that Drake saw it he realized they’d had no idea what size ship to expect—something that big should’ve taken so much power to keep aloft that, honestly, the engines should’ve been pounding the entire center of downtown DC to rubble.
Star Angel: Rising (Star Angel Book 4) Page 11
