The President returned to his seat. He had been occupying himself by trading dirty jokes with the pilots. He knew a million of them. Ethan saw that he was pallid, and his eyes were still dark-circled, but he moved with a purpose and resolve that had been reawakened by this misson; the risk actually had energized him. Ethan calculated another half hour of flight time. His body was relaxed, everything was progressing as he’d hoped. Then within the next minute, he sat up straighter in his seat and all his alarms were going off because one of the Cypher ships had left its formation and was speeding toward them to intercept.
It was coming from the southwest. The peacekeeper felt it as a human might feel a storm cloud passing before the sun. He could not hold back what he knew. He stood up so abruptly, the two Marines changed their grips on their rifles and came to full alert. Leaning toward Derryman’s ear, he said, “A Cypher ship is coming. Very fast from the southwest. It’s going to be here before—”
I can finish speaking, he was going to say.
But this time he had miscalculated.
A terrible bright red light filled the cabin from the right side, making the drawn curtains seem like flimsy, porous paper. Ethan’s vision saw waves of darker red, nearly violet energy in it that made the air spark and tremble. The walls of the Kestral creaked and popped. Then a massive jolt took Ethan off his feet and threw him forward to crash against the cockpit door. He tasted blood, saw stars not of this universe, and felt a crushing pain in his left shoulder and along the ribs on that side. As he fought against his brain malfunctioning and sliding into darkness, he realized in an instant that the helicopter had been seized as if by a gigantic hand to slow its progress. Everyone else was buckled in except for one of the Marines, who had unsnapped himself when Ethan had stood up; he too was thrown forward along the aisle like a boneless doll and hit the far bulkhead, collapsing in a broken heap beside Ethan.
The lamp went flying like a deadly weapon and so did everything else that wasn’t fastened down by government-issued screws and bolts. Cans of soft drinks were flung out of the bar and would’ve beheaded people like cannonshot if the bar had been facing the other way; as it was they smashed into the bulkhead four feet away and exploded. Olivia had the sensation of being sawed in half by her seatbelt. Dave lost his breath and a burst of panic made him feel as if he were drowning underwater. Jefferson cried out as he was jerked forward and then back again, the pain making him think his bones had jumped from their sockets.
The interior of Marine One was a scene of chaos for about six seconds as everyone went through their own little experience of hell. Then, in the stunned silence that followed, the body of the helicopter was slowed to half speed…slowed half again…and then held fast by the bright red beam though both main and tail rotors continued to spin. The turboshafts screamed and cracks began snaking up the walls as the Kestrel’s engines started shuddering themselves to pieces.
Ethan was on his knees. He was no longer all together. Some of the bones of this body were broken. His left shoulder burned with pain and would not obey a command for movement. His lower lip was gashed by his own teeth and bleeding. Around him the air blazed with fiery waves of energy only the alien-transformed eyes could see. Then he felt the helicopter vibrate from its nosecone sensor array to its tail rotor blade, the engines shrieked their ragged notes of despair, and the Kestrel began to be pulled sideways through the sky.
Ethan knew it was what the humans would call a tractor beam. He tried to stand up and failed. The helicopter sounded like a thousand fingernails being scraped across a hundred-foot-long chalkboard. Alarms were gonging and chiming beyond the cockpit door, and Ethan could hear a woman’s mechanical voice repeating “Warning…warning…warning” but even the machine seemed not to know what the warning was about. Were the pilots conscious, or even still alive?
He staggered to his feet, lurched to the right side of the Kestrel and tore the curtains away from the nearest window. The beam was blinding. He had to sense rather than see the huge black Cypher battlecraft out there, maybe two hundred yards away, itself motionless and dragging them into its belly. Sweat had burst out upon Ethan’s face and the peacekeeper was again nearly pulled down into a dark pool. His back…was something broken there too? He could hardly stand up. He had to act fast, before either he passed out, the helicopter shook itself to pieces or the Cypher ship engulfed them.
He flicked the index finger of his right hand at the window. What appeared to him to be a small white-glowing ball-bearing left the finger at blurred speed and smashed the glass into dust. Then there was nothing between him and the Cypher ship but the tractor beam and a hundred and eighty yards of night.
The pain was taking his attention. The left arm of this body was useless, broken at the elbow, the shoulder also broken. It was more than the human boy could ever have endured, but the peacekeeper would not fall.
Now, he thought, his teeth clenched and beads of sweat on his face. Now.
You want destruction? Now you’ll get it.
He spread his fingers and formed a vision of what he needed to do. Instantly five glowing white marbles left the tips of fingers and thumb and shot away along the path of the tractor beam. He could follow them if he liked; he could be in any one of them. Any weapon he created came from him as its source of power, and so he was these five small glowing balls that now grew larger and glowed brighter and seethed and pulsed with the anger that he was feeling, the rage at the stupidity of these creatures who thought they owned Eternity, and now…now they were going to get their full measure.
The balls were each ten feet in diameter when they struck, and they glowed so brightly with destructive energy that if a human eye had been able to see these it would have been burned to a cinder, but fortunately their fierce intensity was beyond the spectrum of human vision.
They hit exactly in the places where Ethan had envisioned them striking, and they hit exactly in unison, not a millisecond apart, at a speed of over 60 million feet a second.
If an Earth scientist had calculated the effect, he might have been interested to know that a result equal to the power of a two-megaton atomic explosion had just been achieved without flame, radiation, or a blast radius. One instant the Cypher warship was hovering in place, steady as a black stone, eight hundred feet across its shiny metallic back, and the next instant, it was not there. It had been torn to pieces, dissolved, and liquified with only the noise of a high wind passing through. The tractor beam was gone. The Kestrel kicked forward again at a quarter of its cruising speed, its damaged engines still howling for mercy. A newly poisonous rain fell toward the earth. The liquid was ebony in color but carried a strong smell of the brown fluid grasshoppers shot out when disturbed by the rude fingers of boys on hot summer days. It sizzled upon the red rocks and was absorbed by the sand and low shrubs that for centuries had covered the New Mexican desert between Santa Fe and Roswell.
Thirty-Three.
The Kestrel made two ragged circles in the air, first falling in altitude and then rising again. On its third revolution, Garrett got his machine and his heartbeat under control once more and secretly thanked God for the simulator. Neilsen turned off all alarms and checked the systems. The electrics were okay, but he saw the fuel and hydraulic leaks indicated on the control panel. The rotors felt like they would hold up. Maybe. The ride had turned as rough as a buckboard over a cobblestoned road.