by David Walton
Alex drew in her breath sharply, breathing hard. “What did you . . . ?” But she knew. It was the same trick the American marine in the demo had done with the grenade and the stone wall. She didn’t know it was possible to do with an entire car—while riding inside it—but apparently it was.
“Quickly, now.” Oronzi heaved himself out of the driver’s seat and out of the car. He beckoned to her. “Hurry, before we’re seen.”
She ran around the car to him. He grabbed her shoulder, flicked his eyes, and just as abruptly, they were inside, in a large room Alex had never seen before. Instead of a normal door, there was a thick metal slab on huge hinges, like a bank vault. The room had no windows. There were rows of computers and workspaces on one side of the room, and a large clear space with charts and graphics on the wall on the other. In the center, flashing colors like a Times Square advertisement, was a spectacle of light points and shifting beams, spinning gracefully around a vertical axis.
“This is your lab,” she said. “On the eighth floor.”
Oronzi nodded.
“Ryan!” said a shocked voice. A pretty Asian woman in a short black skirt and jacket strode toward them. Her hair was pinned up, but a strand had fallen loose around one ear. Alex recognized her from the demo as Nicole Wu, Dr. Oronzi’s chief lab assistant.
“What are you doing here?” Nicole asked. “Don’t you know everyone is looking for you?”
“That’s exactly why we’re here. So that no one will find us.”
Nicole’s eyes widened when she recognized Alex. “So you are together, just like everyone is saying. Ryan, what happened down there?”
“You were there,” he said gruffly.
“Yeah, I was there.” She pointed a finger at Alex. “I saw her shoot Secretary Falk.”
“And did you see how he didn’t have any eyes? How he was killing his own security agents?” Alex said. “Did you see the part where I saved the lives of everyone else there, yours included?”
Nicole waved a hand in dismissal. She looked at Oronzi. “You’d better get down there and tell your side of the story, if you don’t want to be a suspect. Right now, it looks like you’re harboring a criminal, maybe even conspiring with her to commit murder.”
“And what about me?” Alex asked.
“You can do what you like,” Nicole said. “Just leave Ryan out of it.”
“We need her, Nicole,” Oronzi said. “She knows about the intelligence. She’s seen it before.”
Nicole raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
“I’m going to go down there and be seen,” Oronzi said. He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’ll tell them I’ve just been up here in the lab, working. You need to keep her safe, Nicole.”
“And why should I do that?”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll tell them all who you really are.”
Nicole glared. “You know that’s not in your best interest.”
“Nicole, it’s important. She’s not guilty, and we both know it. Now make sure she stays safe while I go put in an appearance.”
Nicole looked mutinous, but didn’t object. Alex was seriously regretting coming here. She should have gone to her uncle’s friend. She wouldn’t last an hour in this place.
A panel above the door buzzed and flashed red. “Too late,” Oronzi said. “Somebody’s here.” He turned to Alex. “Hold still,” he said. “Don’t move, don’t speak. Don’t even breathe.”
Alex opened her mouth to protest, but the look in his eyes silenced her. The bank vault door swung slowly open. Five men came into the room, all of them wearing dark suits.
“Dr. Oronzi,” one of the men said, a quiet menace in his voice. “We’ve been looking for you for some time.”
“I’m a busy man,” Oronzi said.
“I’d like to talk to you about that.”
“And you are?”
The man gave a thin smile. “Agent Clark, FBI.”
“This is my colleague, Dr. Wu,” Oronzi said, indicating Nicole.
“We’ve met,” Clark said.
To Alex’s astonishment, no one looked at her or seemed to notice her at all. She obeyed Oronzi’s instructions, standing as still as possible. Clark asked Oronzi to accompany him downstairs. Oronzi went out with him, leaving Alex alone with Nicole.
Nicole smirked at her. “Not as eye-catching as you thought, are you?”
“He made me invisible,” Alex breathed, hardly believing it. “He teleported me up eight stories, through solid walls, and then made me invisible.”
Nicole shrugged. “If you say so.”
“How many more tricks are you hiding up here?”
“You’re not cleared for that.”
“Don’t play games with me. I shot someone today, and that might not have happened if you weren’t keeping so many secrets. I think I’ve earned the right to a few answers.”
“You’ve put our whole operation in jeopardy, and now you’ve gotten Ryan tangled up in it,” Nicole said. “You haven’t earned the right to anything.”
“How long have you known about the varcolac? The intelligence, I mean?”
Nicole rolled her eyes. “That’s Ryan’s crazy theory. I never put much stock in it, and neither should you. Complex phenomena do not require malicious intelligent aliens to explain them. If you ask me, the best thing you can do is turn yourself in.”
“And if you ask me,” Alex said, “the best thing you can do is stop lying to yourself to protect your precious lab, or your career, or whatever it is you’re afraid of losing if you admit the truth to yourself. This creature is real, and it isn’t going to stop here. Your boss might be a bit crazy, but he’s right about this.”
As she spoke, Alex brought up her eyejack display. She queried the available local networks, and found only one. Of course—the lab was a Faraday cage, so no signals were getting in any more than they were getting out. It was an entirely isolated network, closed to the outside world. Which meant that the security from inside the lab was minimal—all the efforts had been expended toward keeping people out. The network followed the same interface that her team at Lockheed had designed, and her eyejack system connected to it without objection.
“I’m just helping you for Ryan’s sake,” Nicole said. “It doesn’t mean I have to listen to your little rants.”
“Little rants?” Alex said, pretending to be offended, though she was mostly paying attention to what she was doing. She still had the Higgs projector from the demo in her pocket. The lab’s network had the software that ran it, but it was a different version than she had. A later version. How was that possible? She initiated the software upgrade service. A spinning icon appeared in the upper right corner of her vision, indicating that the latest software from the lab’s server was being downloaded to her system.
“In fact,” Nicole said, “I’m not sure I’m up for conspiracy to commit murder. If Ryan’s not back here soon, I’m going to call the feds, and you can tell them it was the aliens that did it.”
The download completed. Alex flicked through the new icons that had appeared on her display. As familiar as she was with this interface, it was easy to identify the right one. The same glowing arrow with adjustable length and direction appeared in her vision, only this time it was annotated with a few numeric parameters and a drop-down list of locations. Alex chose “parking lot” and saw the numeric parameters change.
“Don’t worry,” Alex said. “I’m not going to wait around that long.” She didn’t have time to experiment. She flicked her eyes, and the lab disappeared.
Without any transition, she was back in the parking lot. She stumbled and fell headlong into Oronzi’s car, disoriented and feeling sick. This would take some getting used to, but oh, was it glorious. She didn’t know whether Nicole would sound an alarm or not, but she didn’t want to wait around to find out. Examining her reflection in the window, she initiated the invisibility module, and was gratified to see her reflection disappear.
She knew she had
to get away from the NJSC grounds as quickly as possible, but she didn’t want to risk another teleport before she knew what she was doing. The possibility of ending up underground, or inside a wall, or thirty feet above pavement, was just too great.
She sat down on the hood of Oronzi’s car, trusting that no one would be able to see her, and brought up the teleportation interface. There were a few preset locations, but the arrow could be oriented in any direction, and the numbers set arbitrarily. With a little experimentation, Alex realized that the numbers were in ECEF coordinates, making the arrow a vector from the center of the Earth to a precise point. Not only that, but the program had been hooked up to a map locator with terrain and altitude data, allowing her to determine what vector would actually put her on the Earth’s surface, instead of over or under it.
Was it really possible? The interface implied that she could teleport from here to Beijing, if she got the coordinates right. More than that, if she set the magnitude of the vector high enough, she could teleport to anywhere. Of course, the fact that the interface could support a teleport to Jupiter didn’t mean that the underlying technology could actually do it, any more than a speedometer with numbers up to 200 mph meant the car could actually drive that fast.
Oronzi’s warning about believing technologies you hadn’t designed yourself came starkly to mind. Where did the map and terrain data the program was using come from? How accurate was it? It included the locations of buildings as well, but was it up-to-date with new construction? And what about moving obstacles like cars? Not to mention that this was beta software, probably written by physicists, not professional software engineers.
In the end, however, she couldn’t not use it. It was too powerful, too amazing a technology to resist. She chose Marsh Creek Lake, a place she had been many times as a child, in an area that she knew was likely to be isolated. She figured teleporting over water gave the best chance of the elevation data being reasonably accurate, and gave her the best protection in case it wasn’t. She chose a point twenty feet from the shore and two feet over the surface of the water, then yelped when it was more like five feet over the water. She splashed under and came up spluttering and treading water.
She was glad that she’d tried it over water first; that fall would have been rough over land. The disadvantage, of course, was that now she was wet. She swam to shore and sloshed through the mud to dry ground. She didn’t care. She had just traveled from Lakehurst, New Jersey, to Lyndell, Pennsylvania, instantaneously. She wanted to go back and do it again. It was incredible, world-changing technology. Elated by her success, she tried again, this time to Blue Marsh Lake, a larger body of water in Berks County that she had visited once, years ago. The elevation data was better this time, and she slipped into the water with a little more grace.
She wondered what happened to the air when she did this. Could it be displaced that fast? Trying to move air molecules the width of her body instantaneously was impossible; even if they moved at the speed of light, the force of it would start a fusion reaction and annihilate her. Perhaps the air was traded, ending up back in the position she had left behind. Or perhaps she didn’t really appear instantaneously, as it seemed to her, but a little at a time, slowly enough that the air could move out of the way. If so, what would happen if she appeared in the water? Could the water molecules move away fast enough, or would the friction tear her apart?
The technology was incredible, but the obvious risks she was taking started to sober her. Not only that, but she knew that this was no purely human-invented technology. Fifteen years earlier, such a technology had been the means by which the varcolac entered the world. For all she knew, she was calling the creature to her by this unrestrained experimentation.
The sky was darkening. She needed to find a place to stay, and teleportation couldn’t conjure her a bed or a fake ID. Her older sister Claire lived in California. The thought of going to Claire for help filled Alex with a sudden hope. Claire always knew what to do. She was never rattled, never without a plan, never with a lock of beautiful blond hair out of place. It was sometimes infuriating, but if Alex was in trouble, Claire was the one who could help. She wouldn’t judge or ask embarrassing questions; she would just take care of everything. Besides, the police wouldn’t be looking for her so far away, at least not yet.
But she couldn’t go to Claire. She didn’t know California, for one thing, so she would be teleporting to an unfamiliar place. Besides, she didn’t know how far away teleportation would work, or what would happen to her if she went too far. She had been lucky so far, but she was starting to think she shouldn’t push her luck stretching the limits of this technology.
There was only one place nearby where she thought she would be safe. She risked one more teleport, this time into the Schuylkill River where it twisted its way through Philadelphia. She was tiring of these blind dunks under water, but it was better than risking materializing eight feet above a parking lot. She clambered out at Grays Ferry Road, still a good ten city blocks from her destination.
It was a long walk in wet shoes. She almost took the risk and teleported there instead. What she needed was someone standing at her destination who could confirm the coordinates and guarantee her a clear zone. For this to become a usable technology, there would have to be teleportation stations established around the world, measured and adjusted to maintain a constant vector, with coordinated transition times between stations. In fact, all that could be automated, so that a traveler in Philadelphia could enter a booth, choose a location—and pay the fee—and then reappear in a similar booth in Australia. Cross-Atlantic travel could be as easy as riding an elevator.
But she was getting ahead of herself. This technology came with strings attached, and those strings could get her, and anyone involved with it, killed. She’d been stupid. Stupid to have believed that the wonderful technologies she had been working with had come merely through the brilliance of a man. She had known, at some level, that this was the same basic technology her father’s colleague had “invented” fifteen years before, and that, just like then, it involved a deal with the devil.
She finally arrived, exhausted and disheveled, at the gate of Salt and Light, a religious outreach that her uncle had founded twenty years before. Her uncle had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm a year earlier, but Alex knew the woman who had taken over the work, Marta Gonzales. She rang the bell.
After a few minutes, Marta herself came to the gate. Salt and Light was a little bit of everything: orphanage, school, homeless shelter, and Marta herself was part schoolteacher, part counselor, part mother. She was short and overweight, but stern, and she carried a presence about her that commanded politeness and respect from anyone who came through her gates.
She peered out at Alex, and Alex was struck by how the lines in her face seemed more deeply drawn than the last time she had seen her. “Alex Kelley?” she said.
Alex shrugged. “It’s me. I need some help, Marta.”
“That you do,” Marta said. She unlocked the gate and swung it open. She ushered Alex inside, up a stained staircase, and down a narrow hallway. The walls were covered with bulletin boards with photographs pinned to them in a haphazard array, the newer ones obscuring the older. Marta found a large cardboard box at the end of the hall and rifled through it, eventually emerging with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “Can’t help you with the underwear, honey, but these are dry, which is more than you’ve got.”
She opened a bathroom door and practically pushed Alex into it. “Just hang your wet stuff in there. When you’re dry and dressed again, we’ll talk.”
Alex did as she was told. When she came out again, she followed the light to Marta’s cramped office.
“It’s so quiet,” she said.
Marta looked up from a paper she was reading. She took off her glasses and set them on the table. “It’s after curfew. Everyone’s in bed. Now, what’s your trouble?”
Alex told her. When she tried to talk about the technology at th
e demo, Marta shook her head. “Cut to the chase, honey.”
“A man was killed. They think I did it. I can’t reach my dad, and anyway, I don’t want to involve—”
“Enough said.” Marta stood. “You need a bed to sleep in and a plan for the near future. The bed we can do tonight; the plan will have to wait until tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Alex said, her eyes filling with tears. She had known Marta would help her, but at the same time, she had still half-expected to be turned away. Marta led her up to another floor, down another hallway, and opened a door. The room contained a small bed, made up neatly with white sheets, and a battered dresser.
“Thank you,” Alex said.
“We’ll talk more tomorrow,” Marta said.
Alex stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. When she turned around again, Ryan Oronzi was sitting on her bed.
“Are you done playing games now?” he asked.
CHAPTER 11
Halfway through their quesadillas, Messinger’s phone rang. She made a terse reply, and hung up. “We’ve got to go.”
“What is it?”
“They found your sister’s car.” Messinger stood. “Are you coming?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Not as a cop,” Messinger qualified.
Sandra frowned. “If I’m a suspect, you can’t hold me. You can’t make me go anywhere.”
“I’m not making you,” Messinger said. “I’m asking you to come, as an expert witness, to help with the investigation.”
“Okay,” Sandra said. “I’m in.”
They abandoned the rest of their meal and got back into the cruiser. It had grown dark outside while they were eating. Sandra thought Messinger might just leave her, or else drop her at the station first, but she turned south instead. Messinger was choosing to trust her. It meant that she believed her story, at least to a point.
They stopped outside a Dunkin’ Donuts that was already crawling with cops. The CSI van was there, and cops were routing traffic away from the block. Sandra’s stomach turned over. What if Alex was dead? Messinger hadn’t said very much on the drive. What if she had brought her here to identify Alex’s body?
