She saw the unconscious body next to Desh and rushed to his side, just as he was shoving the commando’s gun into his pants. “Where’s Jim?” she whispered when she was beside him.
“Back at the cottage,” replied Desh, so quietly she wasn’t sure if she heard him or had just read his lips. He began moving and motioned for her to follow.
In minutes they had rejoined their colleague. Like Desh, Connelly wasted no time on greetings. “What about van Hutten?” he whispered to Kira.
“Leave him,” she mouthed back. “He can’t tell Jake anything new. He’s brilliant, and a good man.”
“Then what’s with the arson and kidnapping?” whispered Desh.
“Long story,” replied Kira as they headed northeast, to the car Desh and Connelly had parked a quarter of a mile away. Desh led, with Kira behind him, and Connelly taking up the rear.
Once they began moving, no one spoke, or even attempted to mouth any words. They were nearing the finish line, and if they could manage not to give away their position for just a little longer, they were home free.
After a few minutes double timing it through the woods, they could see their destination off in the distance, a light gray Ford parked under a tree.
Desh heard the faintest rustle behind them and off to the side.
He spun around, pulling his gun with the speed and reflexes of a world-class athlete—but not fast enough. Seeing him move, the commando behind them emerged from the cover of a tree and sent a bullet racing toward Kira Miller’s heart.
Jim Connelly dove in front of her, pushing her aside. The slug meant for her exploded through his neck, taking out his jugular and killing him instantly.
Before the commando could get off a second shot, Desh drilled a hole neatly between his eyes, and the woods were still once again.
Desh surveyed his surroundings but detected no one else. The gunman had been alone, but that wouldn’t be true for long. He yanked the car keys from Connelly’s pocket and handed them to Kira. She was in shock and seemed completely paralyzed. “Go!” he shouted, but his words didn’t register. “Go!” he screamed again in her ear. “You’re driving. The others will have heard the shots!”
Kira broke from her fog and ran to the car. She threw herself into the front seat and shoved the key in the ignition. As the car’s engine came to life she turned to see what had become of Desh. He was rushing to the car with Connelly’s body draped over his shoulders, the ex-colonel’s neck torn open and still leaking the last of his blood onto the forest floor.
“Pop the trunk,” yelled Desh as he neared.
Desh laid his friend in the trunk and slid into the passenger’s seat. The car began moving before he had closed the door.
“Shit, shit, shit,” said Kira as she picked up speed, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks. “I can’t believe he’s dead. It should have been me.”
Desh was reeling every bit as much as she was, but once again they couldn’t afford to mourn. Not yet. Not only had a man he respected more than any other just lost his life, but Desh had taken a life as well. A man who had thought he was fighting on the side of right. In the heat of the moment, acting on rage and instinct alone, Desh had shot to kill.
He forced these thoughts from his mind as they turned onto a main road.
Desh considered ditching the car but thought better of it. Jake’s men would arrive at the site of the gunshots on foot, with no way to follow. And the car he and Connelly had driven here was off the radar.
Kira seemed on the verge of an emotional collapse, so he kept her talking, getting her to explain van Hutten’s motives. The physicist had thought his fire had destroyed their entire supply of gellcaps. Since the gellcaps couldn’t withstand high heat, even if the safe they were in wasn’t consumed by the fire, he was correct to believe they were destroyed.
But he didn’t know they had another facility. Like Jake before him, he had dealt them a serious blow, but still not a fatal one. “How’s our inventory of gellcaps in Kentucky?” asked Desh.
“Good. We should have plenty to hold us until I can produce more. I made sure each site had enough to carry us through if we lost one of the headquarters. But we’ll have to suspend the west hexads indefinitely.”
Desh nodded grimly. They had been on the defensive and had been taking a beating. They needed to get to the RV, clean up, bury their friend, and join Matt Griffin, who was manning Icarus’s Kentucky headquarters this week—now Icarus’s sole headquarters.
David Desh felt the loss of Jim Connelly as deeply as he had the loss of his own father. At least his friend had died a hero. But even as he thought this he realized it might not be true. He had to admit to himself that his wife was now as alien to him as the object hurtling through space. Had his friend sacrificed himself to save a woman who could well be the most important human ever born?
Or had he died to save something else entirely?
42
The small alien ship slipped inside the orbit of Pluto and continued on, inexorably, toward its target. Although decelerating, it was still moving hundreds of times faster than any terrestrial object had ever managed, and it quickly passed inside the orbits of the gas giants of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter. Now travelling at pedestrian speeds its mass and length had long since been stable to within the limits of terrestrial detection. It was a perfect sphere, approximately nine feet in diameter, still emitting Casimir radiation, although at these speeds it was now only siphoning off a drop of the ocean of zero point energy available to it.
All attempts made by humanity to communicate with the craft in a variety of possible ways were ignored.
Inside the orbit of Mars, the ship began breaking even harder, as every one of the nearly eight billion inhabitants of Earth held their breath.
Would it stop? Fly by? Crash? Would flying pigs emerge?
These questions were moments away from being answered as the ship neared ever closer, tracked by every hobbyist and professional astronomer in the world and thrown up on countless televisions and computer monitors. At this point, Jupiter and Saturn could have jumped to light speed and collided, and not a single telescope would have recorded this event, being otherwise preoccupied.
The ship slid smoothly into low orbit around the third planet from the Sun. Then, undetected by the vast array of instruments trained on the ship, thousands upon thousands of tiny transparent spheres, just a hair larger than microscopic in size, were ejected from tiny pores in its hull with enough force to rain down uniformly across the planet below.
The ship crisscrossed the globe and injected its invisible payload for several hours, and then assumed a perfect geostationary orbit above the Earth’s equator, matching its orbital speed to that of the Earth’s rotation so that it maintained a fixed position above the planet.
Its orbit established, it ejected a metal sphere the size of a large beach ball directly at the Sun, and an instant later the Casimir radiation issuing from the object ceased entirely.
Thousands of different scenarios had been modeled by the people of earth, and this one, in which the ship just parked itself in a stable orbit, had long been considered one of the more likely possibilities. The U.N. had contracted with a private company, Space Unlimited, to retrieve the alien craft should this occur, and a terrestrial retrieval ship was launched within hours of the alien ship having established a stable orbit.