Earth Shout: Book 3 in the Earth Song Series

by Nick Cook

  I scraped the dirt away to reveal Cristina’s hand clutching her plastic version of the Empyrean Key.

  ‘Cristina!’

  Working as fast as I could, I cleared more rubble away to expose her wrist and pressed my thumb to it. There was a pulse – faint but still there.

  I somehow found impossible strength to lift the huge stones that had buried her face. I worked frantically, cleaning the rubble from her mouth. I could already see from her shallow breaths that she was barely breathing. She needed urgent medical attention. And I was the only one who could make that happen.

  Despite the fact Cristina had just tried to kill me, I had to help her. I gently prised the Empyrean Key from her hand. In E8, like the twilight zone, I didn’t need a carrier tone to see the icon controls. A single particle icon was already hovering over the key.

  I wrapped my left hand round Cristina’s wrist and activated the icon. At once Machu Picchu and the storm shimmered away around us.

  The lab materialised and the smell of smoke flooded my nose. Figures appeared out of the gloom wearing respirators, their weapons levelled towards me. I was still holding on to Cristina’s wrist, who lay curled up in a ball beside me.

  One of the figures loomed over me and I looked up to see the Alvarez’s scar through his mask as he stared at me.

  ‘Help her!’ I shouted at him.

  As his gaze turned to Cristina, his eyes widened. ‘What the fuck have you done to her?’

  Before I could say anything, he yanked her away from me.

  ‘Get the medics in here now!’ he shouted.

  The room filled with doctors, soon kneeling by Cristina.

  Rough hands pulled me to my feet and dragged me to the door. And I knew in that awful moment that by saving her I’d just thrown everything away.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The blast doors in the corridor had been opened again. I stood next to Alvarez, cuffed and held by two military police. Firefighters were still dampening down the smouldering lab that was filled with smoke.

  Alvarez’s attention wasn’t on me but Cristina, as he watched her being rushed away on a gurney along the corridor by the team of medics.

  Only as she disappeared through a door did Alvarez turn to me, his face as hard as steel. ‘What the fuck did you do to her?’

  ‘Me?’ I stared at him incredulously. ‘Oh no, this is all on you, mate. You murdered her husband and child. Then the absolute icing on the cake is that you tried to put the blame on us. Thanks to that, Cristina was out of mind in her very own version of a personal hell. She was desperate to kill me. Unfortunately for her she managed to seriously injury herself instead.’ I stared at him. ‘I know how twisted your heart is, but even for you that’s downright evil.’

  Alvarez’s mouth thinned. ‘Cristina’s a very special woman who needed extra motivation to work with us. And what better motivation is there than revenge?’

  Cold fury boiled through me. ‘You bastard!’ I strained against the police’s vice-like grips as I struggled to get free. When that didn’t work, I spat in the colonel’s face. ‘I should have put a bullet through your head when I had the bloody chance.’

  ‘Yes, and I have to say I’m rather looking forward to interrogating you about that particular episode. I’m also very intrigued to discover how you’ve been able to evade us for all this time when we have such considerable resources.’

  ‘As though I’d tell you that!’

  Alvarez grabbed hold of my hair and yanked my head back. ‘Oh, we’ll see about that, Stelleck.’ He trailed a finger down the side of my skull. ‘All those secrets in that pretty head of yours are going to be mine shortly. And you’ll be begging me to kill you by the end. But I’ll keep you alive long enough for my people to dissect your brain. You see, our research team have been looking for a subject who can control the alien orb as we build our understanding about their technology. Cristina is far too precious an asset for us to risk, but you, on the other hand…’ He slapped me hard across the face.

  I struggled to kick out at him as the police yanked me backwards.

  ‘Take Stelleck to an interrogation room. I’ll be along shortly to deal with her personally.’

  The two guys holding me nodded and hauled me away. But I wasn’t going to make this easy for them. I let my legs fold beneath me, forcing them to lift me by the elbows as they carried me towards a lift that had just arrived. Its doors opened to reveal Don and Zack, the pilots of the Astra. They both cast questioning glances at the police holding me as they walked out, the doors closing behind them.

  I stared at the pilots. ‘Don, Zack, you’ve got to help me.’

  ‘And who the heck are you?’ Don asked as I was dragged past them towards the lift.

  ‘My name is Lauren Stelleck. I stowed away on your TR-3B back at the Tic Tac crash site. That’s how I got here.’

  Zack gaped at me. ‘You did what? You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘I promise you it’s true,’ I said.

  One of the guys holding me pressed a button on the control panel by the lift.

  ‘What are you, a spy?’ Don asked.

  ‘Nothing like that. Just someone trying to make a difference, like you did with that alien.’

  Zack’s jaw became set. ‘Oh, don’t tell me, a UFO conspiracist.’

  I heard the lift door ping and the doors began to open. This wasn’t so much a plan as a last Hail Mary thrown out into the cosmos.

  ‘No, not like you think,’ I said. ‘But like you I was worried about what would happen to that Grey. And with good reason.’

  I was nudged in the back with a truncheon. ‘In there, you.’ The military police guys started to push me forward into the lift.

  ‘Hang on a minute there, soldier,’ Don said, stepping towards me. ‘What do you mean, with good reason?’

  ‘I mean they killed that Grey in one of their damned torture labs.’

  Don tucked his chin in. ‘You witnessed that?’

  One of my guards stepped in between us as the other tightened his grip on me. ‘Sorry, Captain, but you’re not authorised to talk to the prisoner.’

  ‘He’ll talk to who the hell he wants to,’ Zack said as the lift doors started to close behind us.

  I strained my head round to look at the pilots. ‘You’ve got to help me. The fate of our whole world depends on it. Tell whoever you can trust!’

  Don and Zack traded frowns as the door slid shut, cutting them off from view for me. That was my very last chance gone.

  My handcuffs had been chained to a metal hoop on a pitted table. The moment the military police had left me I’d tried pulling my hands every which way to free myself. Useless, but it didn’t stop me trying and I’d soon rubbed my skin raw beneath the steel manacles. At one point a woman in a lab coat had wheeled in a trolley of nasty-looking surgical tools, making a point of not looking at me. I’d redoubled my efforts to escape after that, but to no avail. Screaming hadn’t helped either – the walls were heavily padded and clearly soundproofed. Alvarez would be able to do what he liked to me in here and no one would be any the wiser. My mind baulked at what he might get up to alone with me in this room. And there would be nothing I could do to stop him.

  A solitary camera with a red light was mounted in one corner of the room and a mirror ran the length of the wall. Almost certainly it was two-way, so people in the adjacent room could watch what was going on…not that I thought Alvarez would want any witnesses when he set to work on me.

  If I hadn’t ignored Alice in the first place, I wouldn’t have got myself in this stupid situation. But thanks to my own pig-headedness I was all alone and without any backup. No one from Eden even knew I was here. Worse still, they wouldn’t ever find out about the existence of the micro mind down here. And, without that, Lucy wouldn’t be able to complete her AI matrix, meaning the secret Angelus plan to save our world would fail.

  Despite all that, I was no longer the woman I’d once been. I wouldn’t give in to the despair lap
ping through me. Not now, not ever. What if there was an alternative scenario? Even Alvarez had to see just how dangerous the situation with the coming Kimprak invasion would be. As much as I hated the guy, if our two sides worked together – and the Overseers actually helped us find the rest of the micro minds – there could still be a chance for our world.

  Voices came from outside and I prepared myself for the speech of my life as the door swung open.

  But instead of Alvarez, it was the grey-haired flight officer I’d last seen in the flight hangar who entered the room. Maybe more significantly, it was the same man the Grey had telepathically shown to me.

  ‘I need some time alone with the prisoner,’ the officer said in a deep southern drawl.

  The guard who’d opened the door stiffened. ‘But I’m under orders not to—’

  The flight officer waved the man to be quiet. ‘I’m not interested in what your orders are from those damned civilians. You are military and I outrank you, son. So get the hell out of my face before you find yourself in a cell too. Do we understand each other?’

  The guard snapped him a salute. ‘Understood, Commander.’

  ‘That’s better. Now see that we’re not disturbed.’

  The man nodded and closed the door, shutting the commander in with me.

  A spark of hope flickered in my chest. It sounded as if the commander might have had more than a few issues with Alvarez and his people working at Area 51. If so, maybe I could persuade him what was really on the line here – the future of our whole world.

  ‘Look, Commander, you’ve got to help me,’ I said as he sat down opposite me. ‘I doubt you even have any idea about what has been going on in the labs down here.’

  ‘You don’t think I know what’s going on in my own henhouse?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply—’

  He waved me quiet as he had done with the guard. ‘Relax, I didn’t say I liked what they’re up to. Anyway, you can thank Don and Zack for telling me about you. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have even known that you managed to sneak in here.’

  This wasn’t the direction I’d expected the conversation to take. ‘Hopefully you can pull rank over Alvarez. Anyway, that Grey…’

  The commander once again waved a dismissive hand at me. ‘Yes, Alvarez and the rest of the Overseers are prize bastards. And they have everything that’s coming to them.’

  ‘You don’t agree with their tactics?’

  ‘Of course I bloody don’t!’ The commander sighed. ‘I don’t know whether to be exasperated with you or give you a hug, Lauren.’

  I stared at him. ‘What? How do you know my name?’

  ‘Four months of deep cover are about to blown. If I don’t do something, you’ll be dead before the day’s out.’ He opened his flight suit, took out my LRS and Empyrean Key from an inside pocket and placed them on the table.

  ‘You’ll be wanting these if –’ his southern drawl faded and was replaced with a crisp familiar British accent – ‘we’re going to escape this bloody place.’

  I gawped as my mind scrambled to make sense of this new reality. I peered at the older man’s face. ‘Tom, bloody hell, is that really you?’

  He broke into a wide smile. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment on my disguise. Unfortunately for him he’s currently being held captive by some contacts of mine.’

  ‘But how? We thought…?’

  Tom once again held up his hand to stop me. ‘Look, Lauren, I know you’ve got a thousand questions, but we haven’t got much time. We’ve got to get out of here and quickly.’ He gestured towards the camera in the room.

  I turned round to see the red light had gone out.

  ‘As soon as they realise that security camera is offline, they’ll be here to investigate,’ he said. ‘When the drugged guard comes round, they’ll quickly realise it’s me that’s responsible for your jail break.’

  ‘What drugged guard?’

  Tom grinned and pulled back his flight suit further to reveal a holster containing a dart gun. ‘Once I’ve dealt with the guy outside, we’ll get back to the surface and escape.’

  I raised my hands that were still chained to the desk. ‘You’ll need to pick the lock on these first.’

  ‘Oh, I can do better than that.’ Tom took out a set of keys. ‘I borrowed these from the guard out there. I really must give you and the others some pickpocket training. It can come in very useful, particularly in situations such as this.’

  As Tom released me from my cuffs, I leant across the table and hugged him. ‘It’s fantastic to see you.’

  He returned my embrace with a slightly stiff hug, patting my back. ‘You too, Lauren.’

  I rubbed my aching wrists before picking up my LRS and the Empyrean Key.

  ‘OK, first we need to deal with that guard and then we get out of here,’ Tom said.

  I grabbed his arm. ‘Hang on, Tom. They have an operational micro mind down here. We can’t leave it behind.’

  ‘I know they do. Why do you think I’m here?’

  I stared at him. ‘You’re telling me you’re here to retrieve it?’

  ‘Correct. At least, I was. But there’s not much chance of that if I’m going to save you.’

  I held out the Empyrean Key. ‘But there is, Tom. Get me near enough to it and I can shift us both into the twilight zone now Cristina is out of the picture. Then we can slip it away under their noses.’

  Tom’s gaze tightened on mine. ‘You do know that’s an insanely risky plan?’

  I tipped my head to one side. ‘Would you expect me to come up with anything else?’

  He snorted and a wide smile filled his face. ‘I’ve rather missed your sunny, always-can-do disposition. And even though I should know better, you’ve talked me into it.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A trickle of sweat tickled down my back as I walked along the corridor beside Tom. We were heading straight to the lab where I’d last seen the micro mind. Eden’s chief of intelligence was carrying a case that he’d casually just signed out from a stores unit, which was essential to our improvised plan.

  It felt like every set of eyes was on us as we made our way through the base, but no one gave us so much as a second glance.

  ‘All my months of work infiltrating one of the most secure facilities on the planet and you basically manage to just swan in,’ Tom said.

  ‘I didn’t exactly swan in. I flew in on an Astra,’ I replied.

  He quietly chuckled. ‘You do know that makes what you’ve done even more extraordinary. You’ve proven you really are someone who can think on their feet – one of the most important skills a spy can have.’

  ‘I’ll take that as high praise coming from you.’

  ‘You should.’

  The smile that had been threatening on my lips faded as we neared the lab. This was getting all very real again. I prepared to grab my LRS from my concealed shoulder holster at the first sign of trouble. But as we neared and glanced through the window, the tension flowed away. There was no one inside.

  ‘Well, at least that’s one break,’ I said.

  ‘We’re going to need an awful lot more than one if we’re going to pull this off.’

  I gave Tom a grim look and nodded as he punched a number into a security pad and we slipped into the lab.

  I lowered the blinds on the window to the corridor then headed towards the micro mind. A red swirl of faint stars were spinning beneath its crystal surfaces. It was a pattern I’d never seen before with Lucy’s other micro minds. What made this one so different?

  ‘Have you any idea how the Overseers managed to get their hands on this?’

  ‘It was dragged up in a net by a Chinese trawler off the coast of the province of Jiangsu. At first the authorities thought they’d captured another foreign spy UUV.’

  ‘A UUV?’

  ‘An unmanned underwater vehicle. Basically an American miniature drone sub. But when the Overseer agents who had infiltrated the Chinese government got wind
, they realised what it really was. Alvarez was called in to retrieve it and bring it here to Area 51.’

  ‘So do you know whether it was glowing red like this when they first found it?’

  ‘No, it was dead when they first brought it here. Alvarez had Cristina working on it and, together with the techs here, she managed to coax it somehow back to life. From my contacts here I believe they then tried to drill into it to remove a sample core. That’s when it turned red.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘I know. Hopefully Lucy will have more of an idea what that means and how to reverse it.’ Tom opened the case he’d brought from the store. Inside was a small Agie plate, Tom explaining to me the name was a shortened version of antigravity. He attached it to the micro mind and with a push of a button the antigravity plate glowed blue. ‘OK, it should be light enough for us to lift between us now. Lauren, time to pull your disappearing trick.’

  ‘I’m on it.’ I took out my Empyrean Key and unhooked the tuning fork. I struck it against the stone surface and the icons appeared. I looked for the self-repair function, but it wasn’t there. The one for E8 I was so not going near again any time soon, but the twilight zone icon shone a steady green.

  ‘Tom, stand close, and I’ll activate the waveform function.’

  He pushed back the blind he’d been peering round and walked towards me. ‘So what’s this twilight zone actually like?’

  ‘There’s no easy way to describe it. But it’s very disorientating the first time you experience it.’ I selected the waveform icon and activated it.

  As the physical particle world shimmered away around us, Tom gasped. The only rock-solid thing was the micro mind.

  Tom’s legs shook as he hung on to a lab bench, his fingers merging into its surface. ‘You could have warned me, Lauren. I wasn’t quite expecting this!’

  I patted his arm, my blurring fingers partly melding with his shimmering arm. ‘I did try to, Tom, but there really isn’t any easy way to prepare. Try to breathe normally and the vertigo you’re probably experiencing will pass in a moment. It’s amazing how quickly people adapt.’