The Ares Initiative, page 11
part #3 of Translocator Trilogy Series
A man stood up from behind a bush to the major’s left. Bautista turned and fired, and Amon finally saw it clearly—the bright white horse’s head, drawn in the war-horse style of a chess piece.
“Un-fucking-believable.” Agent Moreno’s jaw went slack. “Hawkwood.”
“Lucas,” Amon whispered.
16
A Matching Laugh
When the soldiers spotted him, Remethiakara turned and sprinted downhill through the trees, searching for cover among the thick green brush from which he’d just emerged.
At least his eggs were safe. That was all that mattered. His armorsuit could deflect or heal almost anything their weapons could do to him, as long as he avoided a head shot. Had he not lived through worse?
In the event of his capture, he felt the calmest confidence that he could outlast the worst form of torture they could devise.
As long as he could be certain that his eggs were safe.
And now they were.
This thought freed him.
Solid projectiles from the human warrior’s hand weapons whizzed by his head, cracked into tree trunks, pinged off rocks. Using the forcefield built into his gauntlets and pulling some energy from his own body, Remethiakara caught one of the solid projectiles in the air and bent it around a tree, sending it flying sideways through the neck of a particularly swift soldier who was running ahead, trying to flank him on the left.
The man collapsed in a heap, mid-stride, rolling several times before bumping into a cactus.
Their weapons spat another volley at him. Remethiakara cast up a forcefield to deflect the bullets, then turned and sprinted for a large rock twenty yards away.
A cluster of those solid projectiles bounced off his armorsuit as he ran, and he felt a stinging pain where they struck his lower back. They didn’t penetrate his armor, but the force sent him careening and stumbling down the hillside.
He struck the large rock with his bare head, and managed to crawl around to the other side as a geyser of smoke arced overhead, released from a small cylindrical device that was thrown up the hill by someone from the cover of the trees.
Remethiakara was momentarily confused. How did they get around him that fast? Why the smoke screen? Didn’t they need to be able to see him to capture or kill him?
He tensed and struggled to his feet, balling his fists as he readied for the melee to fall on him. He expected one of the soldiers to step around the rock he was using as cover and try to bash his face in at any moment.
When that didn’t happened, Remethiakara frowned and reconsidered his position.
Peering uphill around the rock, he saw that two lines had been established. Two rows of weapons fired through a curtain of smoke, one uphill, the other down. The smoke continued to spread like a thick curtain between the opposing lines. More canisters were added to the mix. The group that had been pursuing Remethiakara a moment ago fell back to a more defensible position while the smoke dissipated in the open air.
In his experience, humanity liked to make war upon their own kind. That was one reason that Remethiakara’s elders had determined them to be savages when their planet was first discovered.
The obvious conclusion here was that there were now two factions of human soldiers in the area. He peered around from his hiding spot. He spotted a soldier uphill as he leaned out and fired into the smoke. He wore a camouflage uniform. The other group that had appeared suddenly from his exposed side had on armor that was all black with the head of a white animal on the chest.
Leaves rustled from that direction. Out of a thick stand of trees, a man with a clean-cut black beard, wearing a crisply-pressed grey linen suit, which seemed laughably worthless as far as utility or defense were concerned, pushed aside a curtain of thick vines and stepped into the open not ten strides from where Remethiakara took shelter behind the rock. He showed his open hands and walked forward.
The only concession he made to self-defense was a vest strapped over top of his crisp suit. And even that was carefully arranged.
The white animal head was on his vest, too.
The only thing that wasn’t symmetrical and perfect about the man, Remethiakara saw as he came closer, was his face—the left side of his face was paralyzed, so that when he smiled it was not a full grin but a grimacing sneer. His skin there was mottled, as if by a burn, or maybe some kind of acid. A horrible accident.
The man said something in his human language, and Remethiakara remembered belatedly to turn on the translation device in his suit.
“—help you.”
“Help me what?” Remethiakara thought, and after a moment’s delay heard the suit project the human-language sound through the chest of his suit.
The man blinked. “You didn’t move your mouth.”
“I don’t have to.”
The man glanced around the large rock they were sheltered behind. “You can tell me how you do that later. Right now we have to go. I’m here to help you.”
“Why?”
“We can discuss that later. Hurry,” the man insisted.
“I remember you. You were after the star shard, too.”
“Ah, star shard. Is that what you call those meteorites?”
“The phrase will suffice for the limits of your conceptual knowledge. I thought you were killed.”
A burst of bullets pinged off the boulder near his head. Remethiakara flinched, and studied the neat man standing before him.
Even under duress, he couldn’t suppress an intense curiosity about this race of aggressive, hairless apes. What was it about some of them that held his fascination so endlessly?
That woman, Eliana, had fascinated him in a similar way, but she hadn’t been open-minded enough. This one seemed different somehow. More resilient than most. More open-minded, perhaps. He could be useful.
“Do I look dead to you?” That sneering grin lifted the right side of the man’s face again, although not the left. The skin seemed like it was drooping, although the muscle beneath had hardened and perhaps begun to atrophy underneath.
“That looks fairly permanent,” Remethiakara said.
“A temporary inconvenience.” The gunfire increased in volume and was joined by the screams of men. “We’re running out of time. We have to go.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“What if I told you I know where to find more of those star shards you seem to prize so highly.”
The man began to jog with a loping gait into the jungle.
Remethiakara hesitated only a moment before following close behind him.
After a short walk away from the firefight, they emerged into a clearing in the jungle, where a flying machine was waiting, its blades beating a racket above. They climbed in.
“What is your name?” Remethiakara shouted over the roar of the machine.
“Lucas Lamotte.”
“This place has changed since the first time I visited your world, Lucas Lamotte.”
He cocked his head to the side. “How long ago was that?”
Remethiakara considered the question. How could he put it in a way that the human would understand? “Well over a thousand rotations of your Earth around your Sun.”
Lucas began to shake with uncontrollable laughter. “I’ll say.”
“You’ll say what?”
The active side of the man’s mouth gasped open, and out of that jagged maw came a grating laughter.
The flying machine parted from the ground and tilted away from the direction of the fighting, carrying them into the air.
17
Meshuggenah
Everyone in the sweltering conference room had come to their feet during the gunfight, blocking half of Eliana’s view of the video feed. She had never sat down—couldn’t sit. She was too anxious. Though sweat ran down the back of her neck, she felt a chill course through her body like a fever. The pulse of her blood beat out of time with the buzzing, humming, beeping, and blinking of the computers set up around the room—the clocks, the monitors, the projections, the holos, all closing in around her.
“No sign of our target,” Major Bautista finally reported, after the whirring of helicopters had receded into the distance. “Four casualties, and six of our own injured. Of theirs, eight dead. They left no wounded behind.”
Agent Moreno punched the doorframe at his shoulder. “Damnit!”
Eliana glanced sharply at the detective, who clenched his phone so hard in his other hand she thought the glass screen would snap in half. “You have to follow them.”
“Satellites tracking, sir,” Tammy said.
“General Wade, sir,” Agent Moreno said. “Request to hand pursuit off to the San Antonio field office. Lucas Lamotte is a fugitive wanted by the FBI. This case is mine.”
“Not over international waters, it’s not. Request denied, Agent.” General Wade didn’t even turn around, he just stood staring at the video feed and breathing evenly, though his crisp uniform was now soaked beneath his arms as well.
“I told you,” Eliana said.
The general snapped around to look at her. “What did you say?”
“You should have listened to me. Next time you want to ask for my advice, don’t.”
“El, please—” Amon began.
She pushed her husband aside as he tried to embrace her, her sweat-slick arms slipping easily out of his grasp.
In the hallway, she gulped down two mouthfuls of cold air, and then she was moving again, swerving through the beehive of the building’s corridors and stairwells until she made her way back to the cavernous lobby on the ground floor.
There, alone, with the high ceilings expanding far above her, and only a few stoic Marines standing guard at the front entrance, she finally felt like she could breathe again.
She sat on the low marble bench that edged the pool and listened to the white noise of the water crashing down behind her. Eliana couldn’t explain why her heart was rooting for Remethiakara, but she felt in her bones that humanity should act as ambassadors for peace, not fire missiles at the first alien life form they’d ever encountered.
Imagine what we could learn if we exchanged ideas instead of injures.
But they hadn’t listened to her. She seemed to have no influence over the general’s opinion despite him seeking out her advice.
She gazed up toward the soaring glass and steel ceiling high above and whispered, “So go where you can make a difference.”
Eliana was up and running again before the words had finished tumbling off her tongue, leaping down the stairs two and three at a time.
She reached the sub-basement level of the Translocator lab at the same time as the elevator dinged. Its polished steel doors slid open, revealing her husband, who wore an anxious expression.
“There you are. Eliana, wait.” Amon hurried out of the elevator and chased her down the hall. She could hear his sneakers squeaking on the tile behind her.
“Rakulo needs my help.”
“I knew you were going to say that. El, please, slow down.”
He caught her arm at the edge of the open blast door. She twisted around, yanking out of his grip as her jaw trembled.
“So you can try to stop me again? How’d that go last time?”
“Babe, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry I tried to stop you from going back to Kakul before. But this is not my decision to make. The Translocator is unstable. If it’s activated with the star shard giving off such low power readings, you could come out the other end in pieces! Or—”
“Or dead. Or not at all. I know.”
“So why do you insist on doing something that could get you killed?”
“Because I promised I would send Rakulo help if he ever needed it. And I don’t break promises I make to my friends.”
Reuben and Audrey, as well as Lakshmi and Ross and the twins, stood silently in a knot by the Translocator platform. When she glanced in their direction, they looked away and pretended to be focused on whatever Reuben was looking at on his computer screen. She couldn’t blame them. If she were in their shoes she wouldn’t want to get involved in this argument either.
Amon sighed and rubbed his eyes. Eliana turned to walk across the room, determined to make Reuben see her side of things.
“Wait,” Amon said softly.
She did, standing halfway between Amon and the monstrous Translocator rising like an elegant modern art sculpture at the far end of the lab.
He crossed to her side, and took her hand. Looking her in the face, he raised his voice so the others could hear.
“Have you been able to quantify how much energy the star shard solution has remaining, Reuben?”
“Not in any meaningful way. We’ve attached two additional backup batteries that were delivered this morning, and have been running the particle accelerator constantly to keep them charged up. I’m hoping they can fill any energy gaps if we do need to use the Hopper for an emergency.”
“And you haven’t activated it since we came back from Kakul, right?”
Reuben nodded.
“Giving it time to cool off between activations does seem to help,” Audrey added.
Amon’s eyes never left hers. “I wanted to save the star shard solution in case we needed it to chase Lucas down. But seeing as we still can’t track him down, and that Hawkwood just slipped out of our grasp, if this is that important to you to risk your life…then you can use it instead.”
“Thank you.”
“But Amon,” Reuben insisted. “If we chase Lucas across the world, at least the odds are good that they’ll end up on Earth somewhere. If Eliana goes back to Kakul, she could get stranded there. Or worse—”
Amon held up his hand. Reuben reluctantly clamped his mouth shut, though he continued to mumble under his breath.
“He’s right, Eliana,” Audrey added in her quiet voice. “If you go through, we can’t guarantee your safety. The consequences could be even worse than we theorize.”
She pursed her lips and looked toward the ramp that led up into the sphere of concentric rings surrounding the transfer platform. Amon squeezed her hand gently.
“One condition,” he said. “I need you to promise me something. That you won’t lie to General Wade again.”
Eliana blinked. “What…what do you mean?”
“When he asked you which of the escape pods the alien was in, you said you didn’t know. But I think you did.”
Eliana felt her cheeks flush. Despite the differences of opinion they’d had lately, Amon really did know her better than anyone. “I couldn’t be sure.”
“You suspected. That should have been enough.”
“I didn’t want to be responsible for his murder.”
“A sentiment I understand. Instead, Hawkwood ended up getting to him first.”
“They would have anyway.”
“Maybe. But now, whatever technological innovations or cultural knowledge the alien possesses is, very likely, in the hands of Lucas Lamotte.”
Eliana scowled as her anger returned, white hot. She hadn’t thought that through, and she was mad that he was right. But her anger was not aimed at Amon this time, it was anchored by him and directed out at the forces and people who kept disrupting their lives. “I never trusted Lucas.”
“I know you didn’t. I should have listened to your instincts about him years ago…and I’ll have to live with that forever.” He didn’t say it in an accusatory way—it was simply a matter of fact that he was stating, plainly, for the record.
Eliana swallowed, any words she was holding back suddenly evaporated.
“If The Ares Initiative needs your help again,” Amon said, “can you promise me you’ll tell them the truth?”
At first her heart urged her to lash out in anger. But there it was again—her instinctive defensiveness at everything that had to do with Remethiakara. Why was she so protective of him? What Amon was asking was reasonable. And she knew, even if The Ares Initiative didn’t agree with her recommendations, they were just doing what they thought was necessary to protect themselves and the people of planet Earth.
They were supposed to be on the same side.
“Okay, I promise I’ll tell General Wade the truth from now on…and tell him where to stick it when he ignores my sensible recommendations.”
Amon laughed and seemed to relax. “Good. I know you’re good for your promises, which is why I won’t keep you from this one. But I’m going with you.”
“What? No way. We can’t put both our lives at risk.”
“I won’t risk getting separated from you again. Not now, not ever. Reuben, spin it up.”
Still grumbling, Reuben nonetheless made his way to the holodeck and began to activate the controls as he typed in the coordinates for Kakul. “You’re both meshuggenah, you know that?”
Now that she didn’t have anyone to fight, Eliana had the freedom to worry about what she was about to do. She wasn’t used to this—she was a hard charger, a take-action-now-and-think-about-the-consequences–later type of person. The sudden gap where she was given time to reflect made her nervous. “Is there enough energy for it to send both of us?”
“From what I can tell, the star shard’s energy usage functions a lot like a car engine,” Audrey explained. “You’d expect a car to use basically the same amount of fuel, with only small variations, whether it’s carrying one person or four people over the same distance, right?”
“Right.”
“It’s the same with the Translocator. Distance is the variable that has the biggest impact on energy consumption. That’s why we could do so many small-scale tests, and also why they turned out to be a poor indication for estimating long-range translocation capacity. Whether one or two people are sent through at a time has a much smaller impact.”
Eliana licked her lips. That was logically sound, but it didn’t do much to calm her sudden flight of nerves.
Reuben made one last gesture, and she could almost feel the air crackle with electricity as the arch came to life, channeling the power stored from the particle accelerator. “Basically, your odds of getting killed are more or less the same whether you go through alone or with a buddy.”
“Reuben,” Amon said in a chiding voice.
