He and the General left the room. Bennett Jackson eased himself into the chair Derryman had vacated, his pistol still in hand. Both he and the other man seemed to want to look anywhere but directly at the alien who wore the body of a human boy.
Ethan took the opportunity to stretch out on the bed. There was no use closing his eyes; he saw Gorgon and Cypher warships hovering in the air. Would they attack each other, or the White Mansion? They might fight for him as the prize, because one would not want the other to get him. He was too valuable a research tool. All he could do now, like any ordinary human, was to wait, and for the first time in his ancient existence, he felt absolutely powerless.
Twenty-Eight.
“Something’s coming,” Ethan suddenly said, and he sat up with a burning blue sphere in his mind. It had been only a few minutes since Derryman and General Winslett had left the room. “It’s Gorgon…but not a warship. It’s something else…a weapon.”
Jackson was on his comm device before Ethan had finished speaking. “Ambler Seven Seven, this is Jackson. Do you read me?”
“Go ahead, Bennett.”
“Sir, Ethan says there’s a Gorgon weapon of some kind on the way. Coming from what direction?” he asked the peacekeeper.
“South. Launched from a ship.”
Jackson relayed this information.
Ethan saw the blue sphere coming, speeding over a desert landscape. It was bright and getting brighter every second like a minature blue sun. It held a tremendous amount of energy. The warships were still keeping their distance. Ethan thought this oncoming weapon was a test of the stronghold’s defenses. He realized he had seen this eye-dazzling blue glow before, and he knew what it was.
He stood up, startling both men and causing them to train their weapons on him.
“Is the bus inside?” he asked. He knew, from Jackson’s mental answer: Not yet. “Bring the bus in right now,” he said. Jackson was still on the comm device with Derryman, he didn’t know how to respond to this command or what the bus had to do with the weapon streaking toward them.
“You’re going to be too late,” Ethan said. “It’s almost here. I’m going out, please let me pass.”
“No, Ethan, you’ll have to—”
The peacekeeper brushed them aside with two flicks of his left hand, from which he saw the slightest leap of a mild silver-colored electrical charge. Both men hit opposite walls with maybe a little too much force than Ethan had intended. Jackson’s gun went off and the bullet plowed upward through the ceiling. The other man’s head clunked solidly against the American eagles. Before Jackson could get to his feet, Ethan was out the door and running toward the stairs.
As he reached the stairs and started down, heading to the garage level, he heard a high-pitched alarm go off. Whether this was because of him or because of the oncoming weapon, he didn’t know nor did he particularly care. He saw a soldier who’d taken a position at the bottom of the stairs. The young man lifted an automatic rifle and took a shooter’s stance. Just that fast Ethan brushed him aside, and the soldier went skidding across the floor, the rifle torn from his hands and flying in the opposite direction.
Ethan ran along the corridor to the metal stairs and started down. The alarm was still going off, a pulsing sound that echoed between the garage level’s walls. He saw that at least the entrance had been closed, but the bus was still outside. When he reached the garage floor someone shouted at him and suddenly there were men in his way, grabbing at him and trying to pin him down. He restrained his power, not wanting to let it flail out and possibly kill one or more of these men. “Wait! Wait!” he cried out, but they were not listening and they were full up with fear; they got him to his knees and one of them had a rifle in Ethan’s face and that was when Ethan felt the blue sphere pass over, in a bright mental flash and a crawling of the flesh at the back of his neck.
He recalled when he’d seen that before. When he, within the boy, was hiding under the pickup truck in the high school parking lot. When the sphere had briefly flared out its energy beams born from the darkest territory of the Gorgon mind, and then the truck and the other abandoned vehicles in the parking lot had—
Something crashed against the slab of rock that sealed the White Mansion. A booming echo filled the garage. All shouting ceased. The hands that were holding Ethan to the concrete were gone as the men stared at the entrance.
Ethan stood up. Again something massive slammed against the stone. The alarm was going off like a madman’s scream. Ethan realized that if the Gorgons could create life in a matter of seconds, they could in the same amount of time program a purpose for that life, and this purpose was to smash into the humans’ stronghold.
A third time, a body hit the stone wall. Dust puffed from it. The floor shook and the vehicles jumped. Something cracked and shattered in the far reaches of the garage. Comm devices were going off, voices asking for details. The shuddering of this chamber had been felt all through the mountain, on every level. Once more a tremendous strength battered the stone. There was a cracking noise like a broomstick being broken. Pieces of rock flew from the wall and slid across the concrete.
“Give me a picture!” a voice shouted from a comm device. “What’s happening?”
“We need firepower at Level Two!” It was Jackson’s voice. Ethan looked back to see the man standing just behind him on his own communicator, his pistol in hand. “This is Code Red at Level Two! Send us some guns, Rusty!”
Ethan had another mental image of four huge mottled warships picking up speed. “The Gorgon ships are coming in!” he told Jackson, who relayed the information, got back a garbled voice and then said to Ethan, “There’s nothing on radar!”
“Eyes open up top! Get your guns ready!” Derryman and Winslett had just come down the stairs. Derryman was giving the command over his communicator. Right behind them were six uniformed and helmeted soldiers with machine guns. The soldiers spread out in a fan shape. They took aim at the entranceway as it was hit again and again, and the rock broke apart in jagged cracks, and the floor shivered and moaned like a man having a bad dream.
“What is that?” Derryman asked Ethan. His glasses were askew, sweat glistened on his face and his voice was thinned by fear. “Do you know?”
“Yes,” Ethan answered. “It used to be a school bus.”
With the next assault the remnants of the cracked slab of rock crashed inward. From the roiling dust a huge shape crawled into the garage. It was nearly the same color yellow as Number 712 had been but was now banded with black and red striping. Ethan caught sight of a bony red protuberance jutting out several feet from a triangular head with an underslung jaw full of glistening, razor-sharp teeth. A bulbous crimson eye was set at the triangle’s three points. The natural battering ram was covered with black-tipped spikes, some broken by the impact against stone and dripping a milky-looking fluid. Ethan realized it was what the life-giving energy beam had done to the iron cage the soldiers had welded onto the front of the bus in Denver.
Number 712 was a three-eyed beast now all leathery flesh and bunched, rippling muscle. It pulled itself into the garage on hooked ebony claws that carved grooves in the concrete. The body had to be at least as long as the bus had been, about forty feet and another five for its battering-ram. It was equally as thick around as the bus, the side of it that Ethan could see patterned with dark square-shaped blotches that might have been an impression of the bus’s windows.
As the soldiers and everyone else in the garage looked on in stunned horror, the creature began to rise up from the concrete, a forked tail whipping back and forth behind it. Its head and shoulders crashed into the ceiling, shattering some of the glass light tubes. “Open fire!” Winslett shouted, and with a cacophony of noise and eye-startling flares of flame six machine guns and every other weapon in the chamber began to tear at the beast with bullets.