“I’m afraid you’ve miscalculated.”
“Jesus, Desh. I’m not even amped and I can tell you’re lying. I’ll check this later, when my IQ is boosted, but I’m sure I’m right. You have to work on that poker face.”
“So you’re responsible for getting this Colonel Jacobson involved, correct?” said Desh, changing the subject.
“You already know that. It’s a transparent attempt to get me talking. To gather what you military guys call intel.”
Desh ignored him. Just because Frey had guessed his intent didn’t mean it still wouldn’t work. People liked to talk—and to boast. Especially when they had the upper hand and felt invulnerable. “But why involve the military?” asked Desh. “If you want Kira’s treatment, you need her alive. So why unleash this colonel, who’s hell bent on killing her?”
“I tried to find her myself, but I didn’t get very far. I finally hit pay dirt when I set up a system to look for work too advanced to be done by normals. Where do you think the colonel got the idea? I have a man inside his camp I had feed it to him, or he would never have figured it out. Anyway, I got lucky and found Ross Metzger, whose computer contained work so advanced, I wasn’t able to make any sense out of it, even when amped. I kept watch, and when I learned Kira was visiting, I set up a raid to capture her.”
Desh pursed his lips. He had thought the raid was too flawless to be set up by a normal, and he had been right. At the time, Kira had accounted for every last gellcap, so he thought he must have been wrong. If only he had taken this thinking further, questioned his certainty that no one else could duplicate her treatment, he might have realized Frey was still alive long ago.
“Did you try to perfect the cold fusion reactor while enhanced?” asked Desh.
Frey laughed. “There was nothing to perfect. The device did absolutely nothing.”
Desh’s eye narrowed. The device wasn’t ready for prime time since it barely put more energy out than was put in, but it did more than nothing. “You reassembled it wrong,” said Desh with a patronizing air.
“We reassembled it perfectly. And it doesn’t do shit.”
Desh didn’t know what to make of this. He couldn’t see what Frey had to gain by lying about the generator. The most likely explanation was that he had just reassembled it incorrectly, after all, but Frey’s insistence otherwise was something he needed to tuck in the back of his mind.
“That facility was my only lead at the time,” continued Frey. “When you torched the place, and when my high-priced soldiers failed to catch you, I tried to regain the thread. But with no luck. So I decided to unleash the colonel and his vast network. So I’d have plenty of free time to build wealth, power, resources, organization—you get the picture. By bringing in the military, I expanded my reach a hundred fold.”
“Making sure to discredit longevity when you did.”
“Right. It’s a bit too alluring. Didn’t want any competition from Jake or his men. This way I kept him focused on the goal. But I wasn’t worried he’d succeed in killing Kira. She and you are too good for that. But I figure if he got anywhere, if he harried you, you’d start making mistakes and I could capitalize. I couldn’t believe he managed to acquire Kira, but then the fuckhead lost her the moment he had her.”
Frey shrugged. “But no matter,” he said evenly. “It all worked out for the best. He did his job. He beat the bushes. And during the brief time he had Kira he managed to give her the clues she needed to finally figure out I was alive.”
“You wanted her to know?”
“That’s right. It was my plan B. If it hadn’t happened naturally, I was about to force it. If I couldn’t find you, I’d bring you to me. Like Alan said, you guys are so fucking predictable. You’ll always do the noble, heroic thing. And I figured if you did come after me, you’d come here, to my yacht. It’s perfect for an ambush.” He grinned once again. “It’s perfect for um . . . entertaining as well. Although you’re several decades too old for my taste.”
“You are one sick fuck,” spat Desh in disgust.
Frey’s smile faded. “Again, I may be a sick fuck, but I have a long memory. I’ll make a trade with Kira for her longevity therapy. And I’ll keep my part of the bargain and return you to her. But nothing says you have to be returned healthy,” he finished with a malevolent scowl.
45
For a week, scientists, bureaucrats, soldiers, and those whose responsibilities for their individual governments could only be guessed at had occupied the Copernicus, and the eyes of the world were upon them.
The small floating city maintained its position off the coast of Angola, and the brilliant men and women who now called her home—the greatest collection of scientific talent ever assembled in a single place, dedicated to a single task—scratched their collective heads.
Why had the alien ship come? What was its purpose? There was no message inside, no robots to establish communications. No plaque with images of alien beings, or prime numbers, or pi. No recording of alien top forty hits, no Rosetta stone to teach primitive Earthlings an alien language.
Perhaps it had made its journey just to dispel humanity’s ethnocentric notion that it was the be-all and end-all of life in the universe. Maybe aliens had detected humanity’s efforts to find them, through the SETI program and others, and while unwilling to reveal anything of themselves or their technology, had sent the ship to answer a question that earth had undergone considerable effort to ask. Or perhaps it was a test of species maturity. Solve the riddle of zero point energy, or find a way to evoke a hidden, quantum message, and earn the right to join the galactics.
But if revealing the ship’s secrets was a test, humanity was failing miserably. The scientists on board might as well have taken a pleasure cruise, complete with frequent onshore excursions, for all the good being on the ship did them.
The alien object had been a bust. Yes, it could have failed to take orbit above the Earth and moved on, in which case there would be speculation for decades and centuries to come as to its design, what it all meant, and the purpose of the flyby. But given the ship had actually been retrieved, the results could not have been more disappointing. The hull was unique and had impressive properties, but it was made from a composite of materials, all of which could be found on earth.
Whatever electronics had guided it to its destination had been jettisoned into the Sun. The ZPE drive had been disengaged, and none of the world’s top scientists could get it on again, nor with it off, make any progress understanding how it might work.
Minute parts of the ZPE drive were removed, recorded, submitted to endless spectroscopic and other analyses, and carefully returned. Research proposals were submitted to the management team of Nobelists for approval.
But mostly the scientists speculated, and twiddled their thumbs. At some point soon the nearly two hundred participating countries would decide the project had been a failure and send their teams home, but this wouldn’t happen while there was even the slightest hope of deciphering the ZPE drive. So a ship full of disappointed scientists found their counterparts from other countries and worked on terrestrial projects of their own, determined that a collection of brainpower this great not be wasted.
But on the seventh day, as biblical as this may have been, no one rested.