Eve saw a bunch of young women talking and giggling among themselves as they approached her, then essentially engulfed her. She was pushed, shoved, and started to say something when she felt a slight tingling and an enormous numbing rush inside her body. Then things went very dark.
One by one, Arms stationed outside of the main lighting area throughout the meeting seemed to meet the same fate. It was so fast, and so innocuous when it happened, that there wasn’t a word on the intercom that anything untoward was happening.
Martin Luther Grady, the Guardian Angel up in the security seat on Sinai in stationary orbit above them was not quick to sense anything untoward, but he did begin to note a lessening of traffic. Not the sounds of the crowds and the excitement of the occasion, but the agent traffic. There were also a couple of times when somebody seemed about to say something and then got cut off.
“Rose, get me biotelemetry on a random sampling of Arm personnel below,” he ordered, frowning. There was just something…
“Nobody missing,” Rose reported, “but—huh! Now that’s weird! A whole bunch of them have virtually the same ritual breathing and relaxed state, almost like they were asleep!”
“Or unconscious!” Grady opened the full channel. “They are making their move! A number of our people are down in the darkness! Repeat, they are knocking you out, probably by injection!” He turned back to Rose. “How many so far?”
“Twenty… No, twenty-two. Oops! There goes another one!”
“Break out of the crowd, drop surveillance!” Grady ordered. Lord! How many have we got down there? Sweet Jesus! A hundred and four! “How many now?”
“Thirty-seven!” Rose reported.
“They’re in among the crowds!” Seldon reported. “We’re up to our armpits in people going to the teaching! There’s no way we can—what? Ouch! Watch—”
“Thirty-eight,” Rose said needlessly.
“Head for the lights! Fast as you can! Nobody illuminated is being taken!” Grady told them. “Run! They’re pushing you, push them!”
“Fifty-three,” Rose reported.
Grady sighed. “Get me Doctor Woodward on the secure line,” he told her. “And give me a full infrared screen of the area. I want tracings of anybody, awake or asleep, that’s going anywhere but towards the teaching. Understand? I want the location of every single sleeper!” He turned and flipped a switch. “Tactical, assemble full military SWAT now. They have taken massive hostages!”
VI: TRUTH & CONSEQUENCES
“I can’t believe the whole population’s in on it,” Woodward told his staff over the intercom when apprised of what had been happening. “We have a full house plus tonight, and even in some of the remote villages where they’re set up to watch on screen we’ve got people sitting there waiting for me to start even when it’s clear that somebody’s nabbed most of our people there.”
“True, but that’s the one advantage they have over us,” Grady responded. “We don’t know who they are in the crowds so long as they look like and act like everybody else.”
“What about the infrared taps?”
“No good. Well, we’ve got some, but they don’t last long. That area must be honeycombed with disguised cave openings. No real problem, I don’t think. We’re trying to trace them through the intercom links, which, of course, stay open, but like the arsenal caves the inside’s heavy with magnetite and similar minerals that really scramble direct transmissions. We have a SWAT team ready to go down in. Once they’re down there, they should be able to pick up the comm links fairly easily. What are your instructions?”
“Wait,” the Doctor ordered. “We can’t get everybody at once, so our best bet is to let them make the first move. Still, I want as much information on what’s down there as possible. We’ve been looking all over for the caves; we knew they had to be someplace. Now we know. Put some probes down as relays and then send in some ferrets and let’s see what we’ve got. In the meantime, everybody’s going to have to pretend that there’s nothing going on in the congregation, so I’ll give them my usual. That will service the needs of the people not involved in this, and also pin down any who are from interrupting the ferret operation. When you’ve got information, we’ll talk again. You can act on your own, using your best judgment while I’m on, but if there’s any shooting, any injuries or deaths, I want to hear about it even if I’m in mid-sentence, you understand?”
“Yes, sir! I’ve got a couple of likely openings spotted. When you start, we should be pretty clear outside and able to commence operations.”
At that a door hissed open behind Grady. He turned and saw Thomas Cromwell himself standing there in full battle armor, with the cross of Saint George on his front and back. The armor was standard Navy tactical; it was smart and able to act on its own to protect its wearer if need be, and nobody was going to get a sleep dart through it, that was for sure.
“You heard, Brother Cromwell?”
The big Tactical chief nodded. “I’m going down with a small team now. You put me where we can most likely get some information fast. Doc’s good, but the whole service is under two hours complete with music. I don’t want that mob letting out while we’re right in the middle.”
“Very good, Brother,” Grady responded. “We’re pretty sure they’ve been taken to some sort of central location, but it’ll be fairly deep. Still, if you drill and drop a line probe into a ferret hole it should reach at full power.”
Cromwell nodded, turned, and walked back out and down to the shuttle site. The rest of his team were already there in suits similar to his but without the cross front and back. The cross was Cromwell’s own trademark, although it could vanish very suddenly if it singled him out as a target.
In the twenty-six minutes it took to land the team and its equipment, the rocky plain had been pretty well cleared of people, which was just fine with Cromwell. He knew that there had to be guards posted but he didn’t care. If any humans were around and attempted to flee or suddenly vanished down a hole, they would regret doing so very quickly.
The “ferrets” were a land-based version of the “fish” used at the lake, better suited for going along solid ground than through liquids. They were small and made out of the same malleable material as the combat suits, so they could morph quickly into shapes and sizes needed to get through very tight places, cling to the tops rather than the floors of buildings, ships, caves, or whatever, and take on characteristics useful for camouflage. Like the fish, they were best monitored with screens and then taken over and run by direct hookup to a human brain, and the tactical unit used a set of small screens for this purpose. The suits could link with the ferrets for a full virtual reality experience, transferring the consciousness of the human to the ferret, but Cromwell did that only when necessary. It took somebody out of the fight here, and if there were armed enemies around, that might be fatal to them or to those protecting the one linked in.
In the security command center on Olivet, in back of the stage, they were gathered around watching the same thing on bigger screens, which were also being uplinked to the orbiting Sinai.
The five-member tactical squad referred to itself only by Greek letters—Cromwell, of course, was Alpha—to save time and make no mistake as to who was talking to whom. They had jumped from the shuttle and set up their gear even as the shuttle rose rapidly into the sky and vanished. Nobody was going to take one of those things if it could be helped, and the computer pilots would kill any unauthorized passengers or even destroy themselves and their vehicles before allowing anyone to endanger Sinai.