Reborn, page 11
Joie looked for the helicopter that had to be here somewhere. Found it. Turned the yoke instinctively, like she was playing a video game, to avoid him.
She notched the throttle forward two more clicks and pulled back, suddenly riding a rocket pointed at the sky.
Now came the hard part. She had no idea where she could take a ship like this. Or who would suddenly be able to see it, on radar or whatever the other aliens might use.
“Joie?” A voice startled her.
Kehoe.
Shit. She’d been focused on everything and forgetting to keep up a running commentary.
“We’re away in Bandi’s ship,” she said aloud.
“Gathered that,” Kehoe replied sarcastically. “You just showed up on Yormevs’s scanners, so apparently whatever cloak Bandi was using is located in the space, rather than wrapped around the ship. Everyone can see you.”
Joie looked out over the wing at the ground receding rapidly. Hardly any g-forces pressing her back, so she had no idea how hot she was running.
Really freaking fast.
“And nobody can catch me,” she replied. “Yormevs, are you somewhere in orbit where I can rendezvous? Or can you be when I get there?”
A long pause.
“Are you certain that such an action is wise, Joie?” the alien finally responded.
“No, but everyone is about to discover the truth,” she said. “Some of it, anyway.”
“Can you understand any of the screens in front of you?” he asked.
“Negative,” Joie laughed. “Non-Terran language unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I can fly it. Control speed. Presumably land it somewhere because it’s smart enough, according to Bandi, since it was designed for a civilian to operate. That’s about it.”
“Very well, Joie,” Yormevs said with a sigh. “We shall meet you when you get to orbit. I shall walk you through the process of a proper orbital insertion that is stable enough for someone to come aboard who can handle the vessel professionally.”
“Thank you,” Joie said.
She glanced back and saw Carter strapped into a jumpseat, smiling weakly at her.
Three of them against a hostile universe?
Bring it.
CHAPTER 27
Valmy closed his mouth before he caught any flies, like his grandmother had always warned him.
That had been Joie Daring piloting. Plus someone else he didn’t know.
What the hell was she doing here? Last known coordinates for the woman had been Hanoi, just before she had disappeared from a hotel surrounded by a full team, most of whom had vanished with her, save for the pair he had with him right now.
He’d fired automatically, but Valmy hadn’t been surprised when his bullet didn’t even scrape the ship. The Danorak had told him how advanced their tech was compared to Humans. That would include metallurgy.
And it had been a spaceship. Some kind. Physics was physics. He trailed it out into the open and watched a star receding into the western sky.
For a thing going to orbit, there had been remarkably little sound. And no wind blowing him backwards like he’d have gotten had he walked behind a jet.
Joie Daring had just stolen an alien starship, right out from under his fingers.
He looked at Vanlaere. She had the same shock in her eyes that he felt.
“Was that…?” she began.
“Daring,” he nodded back to her.
“But…”
Valmy shrugged. None of it made a damned bit of sense. Konicek walked close, so pale that he could hide in the nearby snow.
“Sir?” the man asked.
Valmy turned back to the cave behind him. Base. Something.
He entered and noted how smooth the walls and floor were, like someone with a giant knife had cut out a slice of cake then closed the box again.
There was light in here, but that seemed to be something quartz-like in the roof letting it in, rather than some advanced technological gadget his scientists could unravel.
The space was empty. That ship had been the entirety of value and Joie Daring had just stolen it.
How?
Better, why?
Who was she working for?
Valmy holstered his pistol and turned back to the outside. The sound of the helicopter was getting louder, so he presumed the major was landing.
He walked out and confirmed that, Vanlaere and Konicek trailing in his wake, all of them crestfallen.
The pilot was still excellent, touching a skid just right for the major to open the door and hop out, then lifting away so there was quiet to talk without screaming in each other’s ears.
“General Bouchard, what the hell was that?” the man asked in a voice working really hard to be calm instead of frightened or angry.
Valmy smiled ruefully at the man.
“I could tell you,” he replied. “At that point, however, the US Army would have to take you into protective custody for an extended period of time. I’m certain it wouldn’t be too many years, but you would have to be isolated until we determined that your knowledge wouldn’t compromise certain operations and endanger my agents.”
Pure bullshit, but almost automated boilerplate when dealing with Congresscritters who didn’t have the necessary security clearances to be asking certain questions.
For a Hispanic man, the major was about the same color as Garrison Konicek right now.
Valmy waited for the man to irrevocably damn himself. The major seemed content with ignorance.
His loss.
Valmy would have asked, but that was the kind of man he was. He turned to the helicopter and waved for the pilot to return. There was nothing to be gained at this point by staying. He could send troops later to remove the door and whatever electronics could be salvaged, but it wouldn’t be anywhere as useful as an apparently working starship.
The pilot saw his signal and came back in to land. Everyone boarded and helmeted up.
“Where to, General?” the pilot asked, skipping entirely the part about sharing the skies with something that had looked vaguely like the old delta-wing jets that the European air forces had dabbled with in the early jet age.
“Back to Santiago,” Valmy said. “I need to make some calls.”
CHAPTER 28
Ernesta would have liked to have been frightened by the whole affair, but that would be a lie. She’d never been one to dream of being a princess in a tower. No, she’d had a ray gun in one hand saving the galaxy from monsters and evildoers.
Fifty years later, she had gotten her chance.
Pity she couldn’t understand a damned thing on the various screens and controls in front of them. Joie, however, was flying it like a natural. Or a video game.
“So, please pardon my abject ignorance,” Carter suddenly said from behind them. “Is now a good time to ask what your actual plan is?”
“That was Bouchard,” Joie said.
“Pity I didn’t get a chance to blowtorch the son of a bitch, then,” Carter demurred.
“What would that have solved, Carter?” Ernesta asked.
She’d spent enough time with Joie now, a sister of the soul if not the flesh, to have a better grasp on the woman’s thought processes.
Violence solved every problem, true, but rarely was it the best solution.
“The man in charge would have been dead,” Carter replied smugly.
“It’s an organization, doofus,” Joie piped up. “Thousands of people have to be involved in one way or another. Ernesta’s organization didn’t suddenly shrivel up and die because she’s not in Guadalajara. TRC would have to appoint a new Commanding General, but there are already deputies of various departments who handle things when the top man is out of the office. And whatever research he did suggests entire laboratories and teams of people. They probably think they are curing cancer and solving immortality, because he certainly didn’t tell them the truth.”
“Granted,” Carter replied. “Still not following your logic.”
“That’s because you want to blow things up,” Joie teased, glancing back over a shoulder at the man.
“Fine,” Carter huffed. “And?”
“And there is at least a third player involved,” Joie said.
“Whoever took Romana,” Ernesta suddenly understood.
Joie was playing a game in at least three dimensions, where everyone else was simply playing chess. Complicated, but flat.
“Correct,” Joie nodded. “Yormevs denies that the Heecha did it. The Danorak didn’t, at least Bandi and his ilk. That leaves somebody else.”
“Do we presume someone who can’t appear as Human?” Ernesta asked, cycling back through the piles of SF books she’d read in a lifetime as a secret nerd.
“Maybe,” Joie shrugged. “But I can’t find them until they want to be found.”
“So you had to go steal Bandi’s ship?” Carter asked.
“We just appeared on everybody’s radar systems,” Joie replied casually. “I could probably turn on whatever they used as a cloak to hide when they arrived, but I didn’t bother asking.”
“Because you need someone to find you,” Ernesta nodded. “Will they be friendly?”
“One can only hope,” Joie said. “We’re flying into orbit in a way that nobody else can do. Not riding a rocket with massive fuel consumption. According to Bandi, it will fly rather like an aircraft until we get high enough, then we’ll have to use something like vectored thrust to maneuver. But we’re centuries ahead of anything on the ground.”
“This thing got guns?” Carter asked.
Because of course Carter would ask that.
“Negative,” Joie laughed. “We are a passenger jet with an extended range.”
“What about FTL?” Ernesta asked.
Joie turned a confused face towards her.
“Faster Than Light,” Ernesta explained. “Warp drive. Hyperspace. Folding space/time. However they get somewhere when a light-speed journey is measured in years. Like in the vids or on television.”
Joie nodded at that.
“No clue,” she said. “Bandi said they have it, but that I couldn’t activate it unless I got stupid. Looking at all these controls, he’s right, because I’d have to be randomly pushing buttons and I have no intention of trying something that foolish. We’ve got lights, power, air, and some sort of pseudo-gravity. I can get us up high enough, then Yormevs will flatten us out into an orbital insertion and do something to dock. That’s enough for now.”
They rode in silence for a bit, everyone consumed in their own thoughts.
Ernesta reveled in doing something from some of her favorite books.
“Anybody else hungry?” Carter asked the room.
“You don’t need to munch constantly,” Joie replied.
“Habit going back before you were born, young lady,” he scoffed humorously. “I just eat tiny snacks these days.”
“Stay out of the kitchen,” Ernesta said. “Chances are that something in there will poison you.”
“Oh, I got snacks,” Carter laughed. “Been doing this a long time. Just figured I should ask. We might be a while getting wherever we’re going.”
Ernesta waved him off. She’d lost all those kilograms that age had put on and had no interest whatsoever in gaining them back.
She happened to be looking out the windshield as darkness engulfed them, watching the curve of Earth itself, with that thin line of atmosphere as a haze around it.
Something shimmered into existence, just off their right side bow. Something huge and off-white, like a giant space shark about to chomp on them.
Then light swallowed her whole.
CHAPTER 29
“WHAT?” Valmy screamed into the microphone.
He’d been communicating in coded phrases with his team in DC. Everything spoken in obscure evasions, because he was certain that the entire planet was listening in on the conversation, but they were still a few minutes out from landing at Santiago and he’d needed things in motion.
“Confirmed, General,” the operative on the other end of the line said. “Target designated Alpha simply vanished off our radar three minutes ago. There was a bigger blip for about eight seconds, then nothing at all. Subsequent scans have turned up nothing. Not even debris as we might expect had the craft exploded.”
Valmy kept all the insults and abuse inside. This was merely the commander of a radar installation that happened to have the best view of the skies over the South Pacific, where Daring had been flying.
Woman didn’t even know that you rode into space west-to-east to make it easier to insert. Less fuel needed.
Did she even need fuel? How did an alien starship work?
What were Daring’s limits?
Valmy was certain of one thing right now. He was too exposed. The aliens had given TRC certain devices that they used to hide from other aliens. Such had somehow been used on the mountain behind him, as well as the facilities in La Plata.
He had a few of them in the States, protecting labs as well.
It suddenly felt like a war had been declared. Or escalated. Hadn’t they all been playing quiet games for years? The one alien supposedly had first come to Earth in the 1920s, left in the 90s, then returned in 2057. Almost fifty years ago, and he’d been keeping an exceptionally low profile for that whole time.
Valmy was exposed. Out on the tip of the spear with only Vanlaere and Konicek. They were good, but there was an unknown enemy out there who had decided to up the stakes.
He needed to get to safety.
If such a thing existed.
“General?” the man on the radio asked.
“I will be aboard my jet in under an hour,” Valmy announced. “Assemble all your data so that it can be transmitted. We’ll take it from there.”
“Understood, General. Working now.”
Valmy signaled to the major to cut the line and leave them on intercom. The man nodded a moment later, eyes still wary but as yet unwilling to step over that line and fall fully into the sorts of security that would come with actually knowing the truth.
Valmy considered him.
“I appreciate that this is Chilean sovereign territory up there,” Valmy said slowly. Carefully. “As you now know, there is much more going on. I would request that you do not put troops up there to interfere with my investigation until we can do it as a combined effort. I will be briefing the Joint Chiefs shortly. They will no doubt be in touch with your superiors. This situation must be handled with care, or everything we might have gained will be lost. Do we have an understanding?”
Valmy knew that he was putting the man into an impossible situation. Things unknown and vague threats. At the same time, it should protect the major from getting in over his head.
The man nodded. Held out a hand. Valmy shook it.
He only needed a few days to put a team up there, including a few scientists who might be able to understand whatever tech had been left behind.
What Valmy didn’t know was if he had that much time left.
CHAPTER 30
“WHAT?” Taylor screamed at the alien.
Daring had gotten in successfully ahead of Bouchard. Rescued Bandi’s ship from being confiscated.
“She just vanished off all of our sensors, Kehoe,” Yormevs repeated.
Sounded sincere. Sad. Like the ship had gotten all the way to orbit and inexplicably exploded.
Would that stupid, Danorak fuck have set her up like that?
“Where’s Bandi?” Taylor demanded, already angry enough to get answers.
However he needed to.
“We will go speak with him now,” Yormevs nodded. “Mitch, could you join us please?”
Taylor stood up and felt the stiffness in his back. They were in an operations room with computers he could have had Stone requisition from stores, watching various feeds from Mitch as the man poked into TRC systems and whatever else he could access.
Mostly, audio feed from Daring, because they didn’t dare tap some of the systems they needed. He agreed with Mitch on that. Too much risk of people looking the wrong way at the wrong moment.
Mitch rose as well. Taylor looked around the conference room. Bland, with moss-colored walls and carpet, possibly designed to put you in the mood of a friendly swamp someplace.
“Where’s Stone?” Taylor asked in a much less belligerent voice.
“I believe he is currently training with Sifu Wěn,” Yormevs replied.
Taylor grunted. Without much else to do, the man had leaned back into a martial arts background the last few days. Those two were still Human, as folks understood it.
They might have also just turned into his only remaining agents.
“Could you ask them both to join us?” Taylor asked in a finally-friendly voice.
“Certainly,” Yormevs nodded, then led them out into the hallway.
They paused at a door long enough for Stone and the Cantonese woman to join them, both a little rank from sweat.
Showers could wait. Answers could not.
They got to the suite where Bandi Algom was being held. Better than a jail cell. Less than freedom to explore the ship. The man had been reading a book when they entered. Taylor didn’t even recognize the language the cover was written in as they moved to a large dining table and sat.
“Trouble?” Bandi asked, looked this way.
Taylor turned to Yormevs.
“Could you explain it in terms all of us would understand?” he asked politely.
Mentally, he was shuffling everything, wondering if there were any other agents he could somehow kidnap and press into duty, with whatever lies he had to tell. Pakhet came to mind.
With the two he had, definitely second-string compared to Joie. Still better than nothing.
“Joie was able to access your ship, Algom,” Yormevs noted. “She was there ahead of the one called Bouchard, but he accessed the facility with explosives, so she immediately flew it out of the bay and launched for orbit.”
Taylor didn’t know the word the Danorak muttered, but he got the general gist of it. Something any of their mothers would have washed their mouths out with soap for using.
