The ramp locked in place. Roland looked over his shoulder at the team and Moms, a big grin on his face. He gave a thumbs-up.
The green light went on and he stepped off into darkness.
Moms fell silent and so did the team.
Moms stepped forward and took Roland’s place on the ramp.
In the lead.
Winslow ignored everyone and grabbed his cell phone. What the hell was that landline number he’d installed in the secret lab? He scrolled through his contacts list and found it, under Nobel. He pressed.
It rang. And rang.
Finally a hurried voice answered. “Yes?”
“Ivar! The dampeners?”
“I’m trying.”
Winslow gripped the phone so hard it creaked, close to cracking. “They’re not in already?”
“No.” There was a pause. “Uh, it’s glowing.”
“The mainframe?”
“And it’s all around the table. It’s getting bigger!”
The professor looked at the laptop screen. It too was glowing. Pulsing. Outward. Not possible. But it was happening.
It worked.
Nobel, here I come, bitch, Winslow thought.
“What’s the particle reading?” he demanded.
“Negative twelve point six.”
“Negative? It can’t be a negative.”
Ivar had no clue what was going on, as Doctor Winslow hadn’t told him.
He typed so hard the keyboard almost broke, but it was no use. The dampeners Doctor Winslow had developed, something no one had understood, were simply not engaging.
Roland was at terminal velocity as he dropped through four thousand feet. He was alternating between watching the terrain and houses below and his altimeter.
“Ivar? Ivar?”
There was a burst of static so strong that Winslow pushed the phone away from his ear. Lilith was in front of him, in 100 percent anger/regret mode. Stephen had smartly scurried out the door with all the others.
“Ivar?”
Just static, then it went silent.
Winslow looked at the screen of the laptop.
A golden pulse surged from the screen, hitting the professor. Smoke rose from the singed spot on his shirt.
“Shut it down!” Lilith was pounding on his back.
Winslow leaned over and his fingers flew over the keys to no avail.
No Nobel?
He punched the small button on the left side to eject the hard drive.
To no avail.
He slammed the laptop shut, but the glow was bigger than the machine and nothing happened. He opened it back up to work the keyboard with one hand while his fingers on the other were still pressing to eject. His hand on the keyboard began to quiver. He tried to stop it, but watched helplessly as that hand tapped the return key and he saw the screen begin to shimmer with lights, brighter than the gold behind them, and these tiny lights started to move toward him out of the screen like when he was a kid and holding a mason jar for the fireflies.
They flew out of the screen as he saw his hand being sucked into it. He had a moment of feeling good, feeling superior, because he actually thought of Ivar and that meant he wasn’t completely selfish.
Roland pulled at eight hundred feet AGL. He had pinpointed the target house, noting several cars moving away.
He touched down on the peak of the roof as gentle as Santa delivering goods to a child who’d been nice — even though the one in this house was almost certainly naughty.
Winslow saw the gold sparks flash by. The last thing he saw was Lilith’s face, screaming something and swatting futilely as the six sparks circled her briefly then raced out the front door.
Then Winslow’s arm went into the screen.
Followed by the rest of him.
The big platinum Rolex fell with a thud onto the keyboard.
Roland popped the quick releases, letting his chute slide onto the roof as he readied the M-240 machine gun. He was scanning, quickly doing a three-sixty, when he saw them come out of the walls of the house and scatter in different directions.
“I count six Fireflies leaving the target,” Roland announced. “We’ve got Rift.”
Lilith collapsed in shock. The hired help had left after serving dessert, the guests scattered at the confrontation, so there was no one left in the house as the Fireflies left.
CHAPTER 13
Moms dumped air, the rest of the team following. “Mac, you take the front yard. Nada, back. Doc, safest place for you is to follow Nada. Eagle, how’s the Wall going?”
Eagle had the Snake at sixty feet AGL and was flying the outer fence of Senators Club. Every quarter mile, he fired a probe into the ground. The probes linked to each other, transmitting a field that would contain the Fireflies inside of them.
“It’s a big damn compound,” Eagle said. “Forty-four percent contained.”
“Faster,” Moms ordered. “Roland, we’re coming in.”
Roland had heard the screaming, which had abruptly stopped, but he was more focused on the immediate area. The Fireflies were out and who knew what they would get into? He grabbed his deflated parachute and wound some of the material around one of the pipes that protruded from the roof, using it as a makeshift rope. He climbed down to a balcony on the second floor. He busted through a large set of glass French doors.
Roland moved swiftly along the second-floor hallway, kicking doors, clearing the top floor.
There were a lot of doors.
Moms landed in the front yard, dumped her chute, and readied her MP-5. The area was well lit with streetlights and all she needed was someone working the graveyard shift to spot her. Then again, the only people here who might work a late shift were ER doctors. Support was on its way to help secure the community, but while Eagle was working on containment, she had to maintain concealment. She dragged her chute and stuffed it behind a clump of bushes in front of the house, then went to the wide-open front door.
She slid in the door, back against the wall, quartering the room, muzzle of the weapon following her eyes. The foyer was overwhelming, double staircases wrapping down to an entrance bigger than the house in Kansas where she’d spent many dark years.
She edged around to the open doorway.
There was a Rift. It appeared stable.
A woman lay in front of it.
Moms knelt next to the woman. Reaching into her vest, she pulled out an amyl nitrate capsule and cracked it under Lilith’s nose. She stirred, eyes blinking, disoriented.
“How many golden sparks came out of the computer?” Moms asked.
Lilith frowned. “Six. I think six.”
“Anything else?”
“No. It got my husband.” She giggled drunkenly. “No prenup, but a great insurance policy.”
Moms already had a syringe in her hand and jabbed it into Lilith’s arm, knocking her out.
Roland’s voice came over the net. “I’m coming down the stairs. Uh, the set to the, uh, east.”
“Doc, I’ve got the Rift in—” She looked about. “I guess the dining room. Front of the house, to the right as you enter; the front left coming from the rear.”
Doc was breathing hard — he was always breathing hard after he jumped. “On my way.”
“I saw six Fireflies leave the house,” Roland reported, walking up next to Moms. He took up a position just behind her, covering her blind spot.
“Eagle?” Moms asked over the radio.
Eagle reported in. “Eighty-two percent secure.”
“We’ve got six Fireflies, people,” Moms announced on the net. “Let’s secure this house as a base of operations and get a Wall around it.”