“She’s on a tracker. We don’t have to follow her.”
Morrison checked in with tactical operations again. “TOC, this is Alpha Dog, do we have the director on q-link yet?”
“The director left the command center when you radioed mission completion. Is this an emergency, Alpha Dog?”
“Yes, it’s a damned emergency. Tell him I found Alexa, and that she left with both prisoners—interfering with my command.”
There was a pause. “Stand by, Alpha Dog.”
Morrison gazed up into the stars and finally pounded the side of the armored Stryker with his diamondoid fist, putting a dent in its armor. “Goddamnit!” With that he ripped out the comm module from his helmet and tossed it to one of his sons—who caught it deftly. “Hold onto that for me.”
“What are you doing?”
“Someday you boys will learn it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.” Morrison’s visor swept across his face with a hiss, and he immediately fell into the sky, followed by a trail of debris.
His sons watched him go and then turned to one another with worried looks.
“To hell with this.”
“Let’s get back to base. I don’t want to be downrange when this shit hits the fan.”
Grady watched the moon’s reflection on a lake below them and stared in wonder at the world from five thousand feet. The tragedy of recent events was flowing through him at the same time the beauty of the natural world flowed over him. It was a beautiful summer night. Turned backward, he wasn’t blinded by the wind. Judging by the stars, he figured they were “falling” to the north—back toward Chicago. It was a miraculous feeling even given his black mood.
He’d invented the gravity mirror, and now, before he died, he could see how marvelous it was.
He was still trying to process all that had happened in the last ten minutes. Davis and Falwell were dead. Killed in a horrible way. So, too, was the deputy secretary of Homeland Security—their bodies incinerated as they shrieked. Grady turned to face Alexa as she guided the three of them in the shade of her gravity mirror. He could see Cotton looking below them, probably warm enough in his protective, orange body armor.
Alexa cast a glance at Grady and shouted, “I owe you an apology.”
He just stared at her.
“I realize how feeble that sounds. Apologizing for destroying your life. I didn’t know.”
“But now you do.”
She nodded. “Your scars… I checked and—”
“Then you really didn’t know, did you?” He could see what looked like true emotional pain in her eyes.
“My God, what you had to go through. I had no idea.”
Grady felt relief wash over him. He strangely felt he could believe her.
But then the flow of air over them stopped. They just hung there, suspended. There was no sensation of deceleration. They just stopped.
Alexa was busy checking her systems and looking up at projected displays in her helmet.
Cotton shouted, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” She was ticking through items: “Third of a g, zero pitch, zero yaw… we should be moving.”
Just then a familiar voice came across the night air to them. “You’re not going anywhere with my prisoners, Alexa.”
They turned to see Morrison floating toward them in the moonlight. He aimed an armored finger at them as he did so, the tip glowing fiercely.
Alexa stopped checking her gear. There was a grim look on her face. “Integrated extogravis. That’s new.”
“I can nullify your gravity mirror. Quite a toy you invented, Mr. Grady. One improvement we were able to make was the ability to instantiate the mirror at an arbitrary distance.”
Grady’s eyes widened, and he couldn’t help but feel amazed even as he was horrified. “But… how…”
Alexa now floated alongside them, just as helpless as they were. Like a fly in a spiderweb. “I didn’t know they’d built projectors small enough to mount in assault armor.”
“Not that big really. Just requires lots of power. Certainly doesn’t fit in a flight suit like yours. So I guess Hedrick doesn’t give you all of his toys. He’s that smart at least.”
They all four hung there silently in midair, five thousand feet above rural Illinois in a cloudless night sky.
“Let us leave, Morrison.”
He shook his head at her. “You’re free to go once you turn over my prisoners.”
“Hedrick lied to me. You all lied to me. Why?”
“You’re in your fifties, Alexa. It’s time to grow up.”
“You knew what was going on at Hibernity.”
“I’m so sick of your sustained innocence. You get to waltz around and have everyone love you. You’re the future of humanity, while my project gets canceled and I become a genetic punch line. Well, I’m a survivor. I do the dirty work that no one knows about. When things need to get done, the director counts on me and my sons to do them. The outside world is a ruthless, shitty place. At least Grady and Cotton here actually have a purpose—what’s your purpose? Other than being a genetic library for when they finally figure out how to transfer minds from one body to another?”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Oh, you didn’t know about that project either? Well, we don’t tell you everything.”
Alexa stared at him, her jaw clenching.
“Now push Grady and Cotton over here.” He aimed a gloved finger on his other hand, apparently a weapon integrated into the suit.
Cotton tried to swim through the air to get behind her. “Alexa, you know they forced me to do this. I haven’t harmed a soul, I swear it.”
Morrison laughed. “You’re no saint, Cotton. Did Cotton ever tell you where we found him—a master thief trying to break into BTC headquarters? Bit off more than you could chew, eh?”
“Alexa, don’t let him do this.”
“Your ten years is just about up, anyway, Cotton.”
Alexa drew a black spikelike device from her belt. Its tip glowed with an intense indigo light.
Morrison lowered his weapon arm. “A positron gun? That’s a killing weapon, Alexa. Where did you get that?”
“You know damn well.”
Morrison’s ink-black armored face was inscrutable, but he nodded slowly to himself. “He’s weak.”
“Let us go, Morrison.”
“Listen to yourself, Alexa. You’re breaking bureau regulations. Ignoring rules about tech level exposure. Chain of command.”
Cotton shouted, “He’s going to kill us—split our water like that Davis woman.”
Morrison nodded toward her raised weapon. “How much antimatter do you have in that thing?”
“A billionth of a gram. So don’t toy with me.”
“You’re not a killer, Alexa. And you know that Grady and Cotton must come with me. Civilian government knows who Cotton is now. They’ll interrogate him—torture him if necessary—to get information out of him.”
She didn’t lower the weapon, although Grady could see she was unsure of what to do. “Don’t test me, Morrison. Just leave. And tell Graham to back off while I sort this out.”
Morrison slowly reached toward his harness. “See this? I’m getting a psychotronic weapon—nonlethal—and that’s all there is to it. I’m not going to harm you or anyone. Ask yourself: Are you going to kill me, Alexa? Are you going to kill me to stop me from using a nonlethal weapon against—”
He fast-drew the weapon, but Alexa’s reflexes were faster. A blinding flash and crack of thunder, and the front of Morrison’s suit burst apart in weirdly intricate sparks and whirling vortexes of energy—hurling him backward and then downward.
But on his way down Morrison zapped Alexa with the psychotronic gun as well. She spun out of control, causing Grady and Cotton to fall out of her local gravity field—and into free fall from the night sky.