The Ares Initiative, page 20
part #3 of Translocator Trilogy Series
It was ugly, but functional. Remethiakara didn’t have the luxury of time to worry about beauty, as would be his natural inclination. Not while his offspring were in danger. This all-consuming cradle was the best he could do under the circumstances. Remethiakara turned to Lucas and bared his teeth in imitation of the human smile.
The man glanced fearfully at the platform. Then in a smooth voice, he said, “Let’s have a demonstration first, shall we?”
Remethiakara nodded. It was not an unreasonable request. “Do you have a volunteer?”
Lucas swallowed and strode briskly across the lab to the group of spectators gathered there. The men had dispersed for several hours while Remethiakara worked, but were now gathered again to witness the demonstration of the machine’s new abilities.
Lucas argued with the group for a minute. A wiry man with short-cropped blond hair and big ears that stuck out from the side of his head actually laughed in Lucas’s face. Lucas scowled and swore back, sending spittle flying to slap across the taller man’s cheek. In retaliation, the wiry guy shoved Lucas. A scuffle broke out.
Remethiakara’s nostrils fanned open into a genuine smile as he took a deep, satisfied breath. He hid the expression by turning away slightly.
Someone finally broke up the fight. Lucas emerged from the group with blood smeared across his scarred mouth. He crossed the room toward the ramp, fuming and sweating noticeably.
“This better fucking work,” he hissed at Remethiakara. And then, yanking off his perfectly knotted tie, and dropping his crisply ironed overcoat to the ground, Lucas strode up the ramp and took his place on the platform in the middle of the sphere of rings.
Without hesitation, Remethiakara sent a truethought directive to the cradle. The entangled rings began to spin, activating the Translocator. Near his feet next to the cradle, the star shard emitted waves of heat that he felt through his armorsuit. The chitin covering the platform on which Lucas stood twitched and grasped upward, coating Lucas’s legs up to his knees.
“You may not enjoy the process, my friend,” Remethiakara said, “but it will certainly work.”
He sent his truethought at the hack job monstrosity and gave the man exactly what he wanted.
A glimpse of terror passed over Lucas’s face. Surprisingly, he gained control of his expression after that tiny betrayal, and stared defiantly at the Hawkwood executives across the room.
“Gentleman,” Lucas said, his voice steady despite his obvious distress. “My job is not to give you what you want, but what you need. You may not agree with my methods, but when I brought you the Translocator plans, you saw my vision and agreed to fund the machine’s construction so that you could gain a strategic advantage over the enemy. Now, you will have not only that advantage, but also, if you have the guts to claim it, the ability to create the unstoppable army you’ve always wanted. Your enemies—”
Lucas’s words cut off with a strangling sound as Remethiakara pushed energy from the star shard through the cradle and into Lucas’s body, feeding into his molecules until they were vibrating at a high enough frequency to perform mitosis.
The tentacles entwining each spinning ring of the stabilization sphere flashed with a bright white energy, interlacing like a web around Lucas.
The image of a clean-cut bearded man in a sweat-soaked white shirt wavered as Lucas’s body seemed to pull apart, warping and twisting in unnatural directions, like a heat mirage in a desert.
Crackling snaps emanated from the arch. The metal poles vibrated as they channeled the energy of the star shard, emitting a deep hum that ran like a deafening current through the room.
If Lucas was screaming, no one could hear it. Remethiakara watched, fascinated, as Lucas arched his back, contorted his face in pain, cramped his fingers against his abdomen. Then there was a flash of light. Remethiakara lifted his arm up to protect his eyes.
When he lowered his arm and the red spots cleared from his vision, he saw that there were two Lucas’s standing in the sphere—nearly exact replicas of each other. Using his truethoughts, Remethiakara reached out and released the cradle’s hold on Lucas’s feet.
The chitin retracted into the base of the platform.
The two Lucases strode to opposite sides of the platform and inspected their lips in the reflective surface of the rings.
One nodded sadly. His mouth drooped down at one side.
The other took a deep breath and raised his lips in an even, balanced smile.
They walked down the ramp together, one of them limping slightly. Balanced-smile Lucas pulled a pistol from his suit jacket on the floor, and without a moment’s hesitation, shot his clone in the head. Blood sprayed into the air, and the dead Lucas crumpled to the floor.
Remethiakara’s nostrils widened. He quickly suppressed them, forcing them back to slits with an effort, just in case anyone had caught onto his facial expressions and their true meanings.
Lucas was playing right into his hands. Now if he could just get access to his offspring…
“What did you do that for?” the wiry man demanded.
Lucas shrugged. “I couldn’t stand the competition.”
No, Remethiakara thought. You did it because he was a cripple and you wanted nothing more than the satisfaction of murdering your own self-inflicted weakness.
“Now,” Lucas said to the group of executives who, like him, were now smiling broadly even as blood pooled around the body of Lucas on the floor. “You see that I have the guts to claim it. What about you? Will you be remembered for creating the greatest army this world has ever seen? Or will you bow to your cowardice?”
The wiry man clapped Lucas on the back. After an excited discussion, one of the most muscular men in the group volunteered to be the next test subject. When he got into the sphere, they all looked expectantly at Remethiakara.
“I want access to my offspring,” he said.
Lucas rolled his eye. “Fine. Yes.”
Remethiakara lobbed a truethought experimentally at the cradle. Lucas’s hand reached up and scratched an itch in the sharp-edged beard that framed his now even, balanced smile.
“Show me to them.”
His eyes went distant for a second before he nodded. “I will. But we have no time to waste.” He glanced at the Translocator. “How do I use it?”
Remethiakara considered this, then nodded. There was no harm in letting Lucas believe he still had the upper hand. Remethiakara placed a gauntleted hand on the organism near the star shard and drew energy into himself. The chitin morphed into a flat, perfectly smooth indigo surface at waist level. Lucas set both of his hands delicately onto it, shaking with excitement.
Remethiakara closed his eyes to focus on the image in his mind. In the center of the smooth surface, two large buttons appeared, each inscribed with cutout black letters. He’d taken the letters from what had been printed on the human tech keyboard the organism had consumed. The instructions needed to be familiar and were thus written in their own language, making operation by the humans simpler.
Familiar was easier to trust.
One button read “Shift.” The other, “Escape.”
In each of them, he froze the truethought command corresponding to their functionality, so that anyone could operate it with those buttons.
Remethiakara pointed at the first. “This one will initiate the procedure. The other command will cancel it. Do not use the second command unless it is absolutely necessary. If the procedure is cancelled in the middle, the results will be…unpleasant.”
Without hesitation, Lucas reached out and slapped the button labeled “Shift,” activating the quantum cloning machine for a second time. The organism coated the legs of the muscular man, who drew a sharp intake of breath, then arched his back as the energy flowed into his body.
All eyes remained fixed on the muscular man as Remethiakara followed Lucas out of the room.
It was strange that he hadn’t been able to sense the location of his offspring since he returned from Antarctica. He longed for the faint pulse of their presence. Wherever Lucas kept them, contact with their presence was cut off for him.
The mountainside facility was large, but easy to navigate. There were only four major hallways, two running north to south in parallel, and two east to west, like a giant cross. The living facilities—dorms and bathrooms—were located in the square space in the center where these four halls intersected. As Lucas approached the dorms, he turned sharply right and took Remethiakara down a darkened, unoccupied hall on the east wing, and then down a smaller offshoot in an unused part of the facility.
Or so he’d been led to think. This place was huge, with locking double doors at each segment of the intersections. The guards had discouraged him from exploring the dark, unlit hallways. Without his helmet—which he also sorely missed—Remethiakara’s night vision was as poor as his human companion’s, so he hadn’t bothered. Most of Remethiakara’s time had been spent in the housing units or in the south wing at the cradle room. He was aware of the northern exit, but had never seen it. It made a sort of sense that the unoccupied eastern wing was where Lucas was taking him now.
Fluorescent bulbs inset lengthwise into the ceiling flickered to life as they passed and then died behind them. The silence between them became brittle. The rap of Lucas’s shoes on the tile sounded in the still air.
Remethiakara’s tongue kept flicking out to lick his teeth—a sign of irritated anticipation—and his hands had been overtaken by a slight tremor by the time they finally reached a large metal door at the far end of the east wing. Wordlessly, Lucas entered a code, followed by a scan of his eye.
“How have you blocked my senses?” Remethiakara demanded. The anger in his voice didn’t come through the translation with the vehemence he would have given it in his own language, but that was probably a good thing. He was shaking with anger. Now that he knew they had been right here the whole time, and he’d never once been given access to them to check on their well-being…it was the height of offense. Who did this little worm think he was?
“We’ve done no such thing. Just put them in this room and left them.”
“At the same temperature as you keep the rest of your rooms?” Remethiakara demanded.
“Well, yes.”
The lock clicked and the door fell open an inch. Remethiakara slammed it open, accidentally punching a hole in the drywall as the door struck the wall. He strode into the room, his eyes roving for any sign of his eggs.
The room was some kind of storage closet. Disintegrating brooms were stacked in one corner. Dust-covered shelves lined the room. There, in a small plastic container with the lid on the floor next to it, were his four eggs.
His poor, dried out, desiccated, half-starved, unhatched younglings.
“No…”
Remethiakara fell to his knees. His gauntlets hovered over each egg once, twice, searching for the faint pulse that would signal life.
There. A beat, and then two. So faint as to be almost imperceptible. But there.
He sent reassurance in their direction.
“Get out,” Remethiakara said, standing and turning to face Lucas.
“What…” Lucas’s eyes darted to the eggs, and his eyes widened in realization. “I didn’t know. Look, you can clone them now. You built the cradle, I really don’t mind if you use it, I—”
Remethiakara unhinged his flexible mandible, thrust out his sharpened back row of teeth, and howled his anger.
“GET OUT!”
33
Nerves
Amon rubbed his sweaty palms on the front of the bulletproof vest. The stiff Kevlar dug into his armpits and chafed as jet engines roared in the background. They had been flying over Europe for a couple hours now, and the closer they got to the Hawkwood hideout, the more nervous Amon became. It was only Eliana’s sure, long-fingered hands reaching over to squeeze his forearm that kept him from puking his guts out. He was extremely nauseous, as if the space bends had never let up. He’d felt perfectly fine until he got onto the plane, but maybe Reuben had been right to worry.
There was something even deeper, too. In his heart, he knew that mounting pressure was a familiar foe. Old enemies are sometimes more recognizable than the best of friends.
“This is worse than I ever felt before public speaking,” he confessed to Eliana. “But there’s no crowd of reporters waiting for me this time.”
“It’s just nerves. I’m getting butterflies in my stomach, too. What we’re about to do is hardly advisable. But we need you because no one else knows the Translocator blueprints like you do.”
She reached down and intertwined her long fingers with his own.
“I’m under no delusions. I would make a terrible soldier,” Amon said. “The major is leading the assault and he made it very clear that our job is to stay back until his team has taken the facility.”
“So what is it, then?”
Amon reflected. The last time he’d felt this nervous was just before unveiling The Auriga Project, at the gala where Eliana disappeared. The news crews and the large audience present that night made him so nervous he sweated through his suit before he even got on stage.
Deep down, he realized now, he wasn’t really frightened of the press so much as scared to death of failure. He would gladly have given his own life rather than fail. Furthermore, he’d taken on a great responsibility when he was granted the funding to build the Translocator for the Lunar Terraform Alliance. If the project failed—if he failed—billions of dollars would have been wasted. No one would hire Fisk Industries for anything again if Amon let them down when it mattered the most. His reputation had been on the line that night, and with it the livelihood of all his employees at the company. Failure with The Auriga Project would have caused his whole legacy—his company, his fortune, his campus—to fall into ruin and collapse in on itself like that fallen pyramid they left behind on Kakul.
What made him so nervous now was that Lucas held that legacy firmly in his hands. If the traitor pulled off whatever evil stunt he was planning, no one would remember what a milestone The Auriga Project had been, even despite the accident. The scientific achievement of quantum teleportation directly to the lunar base would be forgotten, and all the public would remember would be the heinous crime committed by Lucas and Hawkwood—a legacy of fugitive terror and senseless murder. And Amon would be the man who failed to stop him.
“We have to put an end to this,” Amon said. “I’m scared sick thinking about what Remethiakara and Lucas are planning to do. I already feel like I have the blood of the people he’s murdered on my hands. Whatever perversion they’re scheming now will be worse than that, I just know it.”
“Don’t talk like that. It’s never too late to do the right thing.”
“I know.” Amon glanced down the aisle of the passenger plane, where Agent Moreno was fidgeting restlessly. “But I can’t bring Agent Moreno’s partner back from the dead. Or anyone else who—”
“Look at me,” Eliana said. “The detective chose his job, just like I chose mine and you chose yours. You are not responsible for Lucas’s actions. Only for your own.”
Amon nodded even though, deep down, he remained unconvinced. “What will people think?”
“Who cares what other people think, Amon? You know you’re doing what’s right. I know you’re doing what’s right. That’s why everyone—from the Marines to the FBI agents to Reuben and Audrey back in the lab—is working with us, planning to put their lives in danger for the same cause.”
“Speaking of risking our lives, we must be close now.”
Major Bautista had risen from his seat in the front row. He stepped into the cockpit for a moment, then returned to address the cabin.
“We touch down in less than an hour. As far as we can tell, Hawkwood still doesn’t know we’re coming. Intelligence passed on by General Wade reports that less than a dozen men have been seen coming or going from their location. They use helicopters to shuttle supplies into the mountains, but based on what’s arriving we estimate that no more than thirty people are inside. Jet fighters from Ramstein Air Force Base are already en route—they’ll patrol a thirty-mile airspace around our location while we make the assault, radio in any news of incoming reinforcements from Hawkwood, and work to head them off. Any questions?”
Apart from a few throats clearing in the cabin, silence.
“Good. Last chance to take care of your personals, by the way,” Major Bautista said, glancing up the row to where the few civilians were sitting—Amon and Eliana, and in front of them Rakulo.
A cold sweat broke out on Amon’s neck. His hands began to shake, and he quickly disengaged his fingers from Eliana. “I have to pee,” he said, getting up and hurrying to the galley at the back of the plane.
Amon squeezed into the bathroom and flicked the lock shut. Fluorescent lights flickered to life inside the tiny space. He reached down and tried to pick the toilet seat up, fumbled twice. He paused, took three deep breaths through his nose, and then finally managed to lift the toilet seat.
Amon tried to keep the sound of himself retching into the toilet to a minimum as the plane descended.
The bitter aftertaste of bile still coated Amon’s palette as they hiked up the icy, windswept back of the mountain. Each of them wore headlamps with the Marines in the front and back of the group carrying large spotlights. The footing was treacherous, but they didn’t have far to go.
Despite the terrain, they were hardly in the most dangerous position. Amon would wager that they were barely even in the fight at all. A concussion in the distance sounded hollowly. He felt it in his chest more than heard it, like bass from a concert speaker.
“That must be the major,” Eliana said.
Amon nodded. The major had led the first strike team, six squads of twelve men apiece, to storm the front door. Another unit of a similar size provided backup for him. That put them at four to one odds to outnumber how many people they estimated were inside. Meanwhile, the team Amon and Eliana moved with had been directed to find a sneaky route inside through what they suspected were the vent shafts.
