General Wade frowned. “How is this going to lead us to Hawkwood?”

  “This is just one of the experiments they conducted in that secret project, which coopted the nickname of the original nuclear project, Uranverein—the uranium club. What we don’t know, and what people have been speculating about for years, is where they conducted these experiments. We got this information when the Germany declassified the remainder of the Nazi experiments fifteen years ago. That’s around the time Amon and I first met, and we began the work that eventually led to the construction of the Translocator.”

  He didn’t have to point or gesture, but the eyes of everyone in the room unconsciously tracked up to the massive electrified arch that towered overhead.

  “And?” General Wade said, drawing everyone’s attention back to Reuben.

  “Well, two things. For starters, now that we know that Lucas has all of this old research, we might be able to narrow down what, exactly, he’s trying to accomplish with his copycat Hopper. Lucas was never one for original ideas. My guess is that whatever he’s trying to do has its origination point in this research.”

  Major Bautista and General Wade were both nodding along now.

  “If we know what he’s trying to do, we can figure out how to counter him,” Major Bautista said.

  “The second thing,” Reuben said, “and more important than the first, is that if we can figure out where the Nazis conducted these experiments, maybe that will give us a lead on where Lucas and Hawkwood are hiding.”

  Agent Moreno said, “We know the Nazis had several secret bases in the Swiss Alps.”

  “Precisely. You can even see mountains in the background of this photo.”

  Over the shoulders of the white-coated Nazi scientists, shrouded by mist and distance, a row of mountain peaks jutted into the sky.

  “If we can figure out where their base of operations was—where the so-called uranium club conducted their nuclear experiments—I’d bet money that it will lead us to Lucas.”

  “Well,” Eliana said. “If archaeologists are good at one thing, it’s making sense of ancient history. Let’s start digging.”

  29

  Cradle

  Remethiakara picked up the large clay pot full of dark soil, and carried it across the room.

  According to Lucas, the cavernous atriums of this underground facility had been carved out of the mountain over a century ago, during a great war. Then it had been lost to the annals of history, only to be rediscovered by Hawkwood, the mercenary organization Lucas served.

  The couple dozen people who haunted this vast facility were all members of Hawkwood. Of those, half of them were fighting men that served double duty—they were both the security force and Remethiakara’s prison guards. They protected the clandestine location from outsider intrusion, and they kept him from finding an exit. He was given his own room, but even while he slept he was under heavy guard. Everywhere he went, they followed him—with their guns and their eyes and their cameras.

  He used to be the one running the zoo. Now he found himself living in one.

  Admittedly, the facility didn’t seem to be in need of much protection from the outside world. During the trip to reach the mountain lair from Antarctica, which had taken place in the daylight, Remethiakara had finally been afforded the opportunity to see for himself how remote the place was—located deep in the mountain range, far from even the smallest population centers.

  No more overt displays of force had been made against him since the confrontation with Lucas in Antarctica. Remethiakara had also been careful not to provoke the fighting men. He just wasn’t desperate enough to try anything rash yet.

  Lucas needs you. That’s the key.

  As Remethiakara carried the large clay pot toward the stand of several computers and a holodeck that controlled the Translocator, Lucas watched him from the far side of the room. He was standing among a group of men, none of whom had introduced themselves to Remethiakara. Some wore formal suits. Others looked like veteran warriors—aging, but still bulky and scarred and full of swagger.

  “So how’s this work?” Lucas called across the room.

  “You’ll see,” Remethiakara said.

  The other men cast irritated glanced in Lucas’s direction. He shrugged and dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a wadded up handkerchief, affecting disinterest.

  Remethiakara had observed that Lucas drooled more when he was excited. It was disgusting.

  Ignoring his anxious audience, who obviously suspected foul play since they themselves were taking that approach, Remethiakara stopped by the computer and set the clay pot down next to the night-black star shard, which he’d placed there earlier in anticipation of this task. Mere feet away, the glass and metal machines Lucas used to operate the Translocator hummed and whirred and flashed with little lights.

  It had taken him years to learn how to direct the power of the star shards—now, it was second nature. How many times in his life had he built a new cradle? How many times had he started a new colony? How often had his people been forced to begin again?

  Since they lost their homeworld and became a race that wandered among the stars, his people had learned to thrive wherever they found themselves. That was their biggest advantage—an ability to grow new life on any blasted hunk of rock.

  Remethiakara slowed his breathing and focused his mind. This drew impatient coughs and throat clearings from Lucas’s direction. He tuned them out like the background noise they were.

  Everything else narrowed to unimportance—the echoey atrium, his impatient audience, the danger he’d inadvertently dumped his offspring into…all of it faded to a distant hum.

  Then, slowly, dipping into the black well of energy contained in the star shard with his truethoughts, Remethiakara began to draw power out like a thread.

  He forced the air out of his lower lungs. When he breathed back in, he filled them with raw power. Energy pulsed through his body, conducted through his blood and bones. It tingled the tips of his fingers and the narrow slitted nostrils through which he drew in yet more oxygen.

  Remethiakara held his breath, and focused on his body which seemed to thrum with sparkling energy.

  It had taken some effort to get the balance of chemicals in the soil right.

  Will this work again?

  He smiled at the familiar thought. It was always this way in the moment before he began. That’s how it was with truethoughts. When you’re creating something from nothing—or combining a million disparate atoms and compounds into a sum that is greater than their individual parts—there is always that moment of self-doubt before you begin.

  And then you lean into it.

  You move through it.

  Remethiakara exhaled and directed the power within him to flow like a river into the nutrient-rich soil, where a piece of his own flesh, cut from his arm, had already been buried.

  At the same time, he raised his right hand and rolled up the flexible sleeve of his armorsuit, exposing a cotton bandage that covered the self-inflicted wound. Using the star shard’s power, he made a blade of the air and sliced through the bandage and into his flesh a second time, drawing a line of black blood through which the excess oxygen bubbled out.

  As he exhaled, the power flowed out of him and Remethiakara shivered with the pain of its exit.

  The stream of black blood soaked into the dirt, creating a conduit through which the shard’s energy could leave his body and catalyze the nutrients in the soil.

  It provided the seed of organic life he’d planted there with an impetus to grow. And a bond which could only be broken by the shard’s destruction.

  When the soil was moist with black blood, Remethiakara stood and pulled his arm away as he re-secured the bandage.

  Then he placed the star shard on top of the soil.

  “Is that it?” Lucas said in a low voice.

  Remethiakara glanced over his shoulder. Lucas had crossed the room to stand only a few feet away behind him. The others hung back, flanked by wary soldiers hugging their automatic rifles to their chests. Even the tough-looking grizzled veterans clenched their teeth and gazed warily from beneath their brows.

  Lucas wrung his damp handkerchief in his hand and peered around Remethiakara toward the clay pot. A trickle of blood dropped down the side of the red fired clay. Lucas raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  “Patience,” Remethiakara said.

  Several minutes passed. A few people began to grumble. Their interest wandered.

  Suddenly, there was the sound of clay cracking. Small shards of pottery began to snap off and careen across the floor.

  Three micro-thin tendrils shot out in different directions and slapped out along the sides of the computer towers and holoprojector screens. They glommed onto the oblong, rough-edged meteorite, squirming hungrily as they squeezed the rock and found purchase in imperfections along its surface.

  “Incredible.” Lucas dabbed at his mouth. “How does it work?”

  “It is similar to the brain that powers your computers, the…what did you call it?”

  “The CPU?”

  “The cradle serves a similar function in our biotech, but even more than that: it is the brain as well as the heart. We shall know shortly if it will be able to integrate with your machines.”

  Remethiakara bent down next to the pot and carefully removed the pieces of clay that had not been forced free by the sudden expansion within the soil. He brushed aside the dirt and traced the tendrils back to the raw nerve center of the living organism he’d just shocked into life—the cradle. It was exposed, at risk now more than at any point in its life, as its root system had not been fully established. This new ‘central processing unit’ would give him the ability to give Lucas what he wanted.

  And much more.

  “As it grows, the cradle will provide a method to siphon power from the star shard,” Remethiakara said, “and a system through which we will be able to channel the shard’s wild power into the Translocator.”

  “Impressive, Remy.”

  Remethiakara gritted his teeth at the nickname he despised.

  Instead of reacting to it, he turned away from Lucas and floated his hand over the soil. He felt a pulse through his armorsuit. Already, the organ had swallowed the star shard. It was now big enough to fit in his palm. It pulsed out of time, spasmodic, like a fish out of water, beating its raw existence desperately into the cold air.

  Through his palm, Remethiakara sent a truethought that exuded warmth and safety—the same emotion he sent to his egg-bound offspring in times of stress—to reassure the creature, to connect to it.

  A perception of relief and gratitude pinged back into his somatic senses. The emotion was faint but present, and he knew its ability to communicate would evolve as it grew. The organ’s contractions slowed to a more even, steady rhythm, and Remethiakara turned back to Lucas.

  “When will it be ready?” Lucas asked.

  “Soon.” Remethiakara gestured Lucas to come closer. “Watch.”

  He placed his open hand over the organ and massaged it gently, using his truethoughts coupled with the star shard’s well of power to manipulate the organ’s shape without touching it.

  Its edges rippled.

  Its volume smoothed out and rounded.

  Then it flatted and spread its roots into the vents in the computer towers, over the holoprojectors, across the floor, growing before their eyes as it slowly consumed the machine.

  Lucas pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at a strand of drool that dribbled down his chin. “This better work.”

  “Don’t worry,” Remethiakara said. “It will work. As long as you hold up your end of the bargain.”

  With an involuntary twitch, Lucas’s eyes shifted toward the knot of men on the other side of the cavernous room. He lowered his voice and whispered, “Are you threatening me?”

  “Of course not.” Remethiakara pulled back thin lips to show his teeth to Lucas, in an imitation of the human smile. “We need each other.”

  Remethiakara licked his teeth.

  The cradle pulsed under his hand.

  30

  Manhunt

  The screen of the laptop blurred. Eliana closed her eyes, leaned away and rubbed her neck, which was sore from hunching over the screen for hours, reading the tiny typewriter font they printed lab reports in circa 1940.

  Her faint memories of undergrad classes in German had been put to the test as she joined the others in rifling through the archived scans of research notes from Nazi scientists, hoping that some scrap of information would give them a clue as to Lucas’s plans and whereabouts.

  “Here,” she said. “Someone else take this for a while. I stopped at Müller, Hermann. October 14th, 1940.”

  “I’m pretty sure these words have no meaning anymore,” Lakshmi said as she took the laptop into her lap. “Even with the computer translating most of the German for me.”

  “Then look through the photo archive instead.”

  She groaned. “More disfigured mice?”

  “They used frogs in several experiments,” Agent Moreno supplied from across the room.

  “Egh.”

  Agent Moreno paced back and forth as he stared at a large digital map of the Swiss Alps that he’d projected onto the wall. Sections of it were highlighted in red and yellow, indicating where satellite scans for signs of life or the heat signature of an active nuclear reactor had already been conducted.

  She patted Agent Moreno on the shoulder. “Have they been able to pinpoint where the July 1942 photo was taken?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “The FBI pattern recognition search on the mountain range came up with a few possibilities, but nothing concrete. Director Badeux got me access to NASA satellite photographs, and General Wade has his aides scouring through those an inch at a time.”

  “I’m going to go check on Amon,” Eliana told her team. “There’s gotta be something. We’ll find him. Just keep looking.”

  Eliana exited the lounge. As she crossed the lab, she saw that she wasn’t the only one who needed a short break. Through the glass of the hyperbaric chamber, Eliana saw Amon close his eyes and take a deep, steadying breath through his nose. His voice was muffled by the glass, but he tended to enunciate more clearly when he was angry, and she could hear the way he bit off each word as he spoke.

  “Reuben,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore. I need to move. Let me out of this damn thing.”

  “Look, this isn’t like a normal case of decompression sickness,” Reuben said. “The rashes on your skin have started to heal, but it’ll be at least another twelve hours before the air pressure regulates back to sea level. We don’t know how your body will react if I let you out now.”

  “He’s right,” Audrey said. “Anywhere from seven to fourteen percent of divers who recovered from the bends using hyperbaric oxygen treatment experience ongoing symptoms.”

  “Not to mention that when you last went through the Translocator, your particles came together all mixed up with the weapons the natives were holding. That and the low-powered Translocation both contributed to your molecular instability. We’ve been monitoring you for heavy metals poisoning, blood embolisms, ongoing neurological sequelae…”

  “And have you found anything yet?”

  “Not yet, but I’m still running some—”

  “Great!” Amon interrupted. “No symptoms. Now let me out!”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Reuben. Listen. I’ve been in here for days. I’m tired of pissing into a bag. My own body odor is starting to make me gag. I desperately need a shower, and nothing would make me happier than to shit on a real toilet instead of inside this glass cage. Otherwise, though, I feel perfectly fine.”

  Eliana snorted with barely contained laughter. He really did seem to be better. She hoped it was true. Amon’s guiltless grin following his words caused Audrey to blush and turned away.

  Reuben, however, did not seem to think it was very amusing. He glared at Amon.

  “Fine. Fine! But if your molecules fly apart when you step out of the chamber, you’ve only got yourself to blame. If not, you can shower, but after an hour you’ll report right back. You hear me? You’ll come straight back here so I can take your vitals.”

  “Fantastic. Deal.”

  Reuben heaved a deep sigh, then rolled his baggy denim shirt sleeves up to his elbows and entered the code that would release Amon from the hyperbaric chamber.

  Eliana gritted her teeth in nervous anticipation.

  There was a slight hissing sound as the pressure equalized. Amon worked his jaw and shook his head to ward off the sensation of discomfort he was obviously experiencing. When the glass lid hinged open, he eagerly clambered out.

  Amon staggered with his first step, but Eliana was already at his side. He grabbed at her shoulder to steady himself and she felt a chill there where his hand pressed. There was a brief moment of pressure, and then it was gone as Amon fell forward. Instinctively, she caught him around his waist and pulled him back against the solidness of her body.

  Amon leaned into her. He flexed his hand, opening it and then making a fist a few times. For a brief moment, she thought she could see the floor through his hand.

  But then she blinked and it was solid. She touched his palm to be sure of it.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. It just tingles a bit.”

  “What’s wrong?” Reuben said.

  “Nothing. Look. Solid as a rock.”

  “Bah!” Reuben said as he turned and stalked away. “Back here in one hour, Amon! I mean it.”

  “Yes, sir, boss, sir.”

  “Lean on me,” Eliana said.

  When Amon wrapped his arms around her, she was assaulted by a particularly strong odor.

  “You weren’t kidding,” she said. “You really do need a shower.”

  He laughed. “Yes, that’s true. But first—have you found anything in the archives?”

  “Not yet. But we’re still looking. We’ll find something.”

  “Show me.”

 

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