“Lean on me,” Dave said to Ethan, but the peacekeeper answered, “I can move on my own, thank you.” He had to, though the pain was gnawing at him from a dozen places. He could walk but only at a slow hobble. Going down the stairs, Olivia offered him her arm, and he took it just for the sake of balance.
Then all of them—Ethan, Dave, Olivia, Jefferson, the President, Derryman, Winslett, and Corporal Suarez—stood on a flat plain that rose to rugged foothills, discernible by the flare of explosions and streaks of flame through the clouds above. Ethan noted that more Cypher and Gorgon ships were converging to the battle. Fleets of them were coming in at high speed from all directions. A blast with the noise of a dozen sonic booms crackled across the sky and made everyone in the group wince. They saw, miles away across the plain, an injured Gorgon ship punctured by red-glowing wounds drop down beneath the clouds. It was hit by a dozen more spheres and wobbled to the northwest on an uncertain and likely short course.
The President began to stride away from the helicopter. Everyone else followed. The two pilots remained with the Kestrel. Ethan doubted that they would be able to make suitable repairs, but maybe they were going to try their best. He followed along, moving like the aged human he suddenly felt himself to be, between Dave and Olivia with Jefferson walking behind him and to the left.
Beale walked a distance of about seventy yards and stopped. He faced only the flat plain, the foothills and the dark splashed with the flashes and flares of the war above them. Ethan saw him reach into his suit jacket and bring out a small black device not unlike the communication unit. He pressed a series of buttons on it.
And waited.
Nothing happened.
A blazing blue streak of energy speared down into the foothills about two miles away and tossed earth into the air. The ground trembled beneath their feet.
Beale pressed the buttons again. Still nothing happened. Ethan had to rest his right hand against Dave’s shoulder for support, and on his other side he was supported by Olivia’s arm.
The President looked to Derryman. His face rippled with the nervous tic and his voice had weakened. “Vance…I know I’m in the right place. Maybe I’ve forgotten the sequence?”
“Let’s try fresh batteries,” Derryman said, and he brought from his own pocket four small Duracells he’d taken from a package in the storeroom.
“I should’ve thought of that.”
“My job is to think for you when your mind is full.” Derryman was illuminated by the bursts of deadly flame in the sky as he took the device and popped it open. He removed the old batteries and inserted the new. “Here, try it now.”
Beale repeated the procedure, a pattern of six numbers, a star, and six numbers once more.
For a moment, again nothing happened. Ethan was the first to feel the thrum of machinery moving in the earth.
A section of the plain was angling downward to make a ramp wide enough for a military truck. Small blue guidelights flickered on in the concrete walls. Drifts of dust were pulled into what sounded like air intakes, but it appeared that the rectangle of earth concealing the ramp was a fabrication of some kind of weather-resistant material. Fake sand and pebbles were part of the camouflage. A soft blue glow grew stronger in the opening. The ramp stopped at a fifteen-degree angle and the rumble of machinery ceased.
“Watch your step going down,” Beale advised. “The surface was meant for tires, not shoes. Ethan, grab hold of someone, I don’t want you falling.”
“Yes sir,” Ethan said, because after all Beale was the President of the United States. He again found support between Dave and Olivia, with Jefferson behind him to catch if either one of them stumbled. The rubbery artificial surface gripped shoe soles better than Beale had suggested. On his way down the ramp, Ethan looked up at the battle. The clouds pulsed with fire. A huge explosion sent pieces of Cypher ship whirling to Earth beyond a range of distant mountains. A few seconds after that, the triangular shape of a Gorgon craft swept over the plain about five hundred feet up. It was nearly sliced in two, fluids pouring from the hexagonal passages. Something shimmering and shaped like a child’s top spun rapidly across the sky, shooting red energy spheres in all directions before it too exploded, or rather imploded because there was no sound in its destruction.
Ethan could feel them gathering, could sense the harmonics in the hundreds of warships that were answering the call of Gorgons and Cyphers. The clouds boiled like dirty yellow water in a pot. Energy bolts whipped down like jagged lightning and cracked upon the mountains. Red spheres that had missed their targets or been deflected in some way streaked on toward the horizons. Ethan thought of the last stand at Panther Ridge, and wondered if the alien forces had decided their last stand against each other would be in the sky here, thousands of feet above Area 51.
The group reached the bottom, which was a small parking garage and loading docks for trucks. Everything was illuminated in the soft blue glow. The President used his control device again and the ramp began to close. Just before the opening was sealed, Ethan and the others saw the massive underside of a Cypher ship, like a shiny black roach, pass only a hundred feet or so overhead. It was pocked with smoking holes, each one large enough to fly the Kestrel into. It moved on, its propulsion silent but an eerie high-pitched electronic chatter coming from dying systems.
The instant the ramp closed up, brighter white tubes of light illuminated at the ceiling. They were the same light tubes Ethan had seen at the White Mansion installation. Alien technology, as Derryman had explained, powered the S-4 center as well. Down here there was no sound of the war above but rather only the polite hissing of an air-filtration system scrubbing away any dust that might have drifted in. Lights had come on in a glassed-in guard’s station, empty of a guard. Two traffic barriers painted yellow with black diagonal stripes stood on either side of the guard’s station, but they were easily walked around. Beale led the way deeper into the complex with Corporal Suarez right at his side and Derryman and Winslett only a couple of paces behind. Twice Beale stopped to allow Ethan, helped along by Olivia and Dave, to catch up.
They came to an elevator with stainless steel doors. Beside it was an illuminated keypad and above it a flat black screen like a computer monitor. Beale keyed in a string of numbers. The attempt did nothing, the monitor remained blank. “Damn,” the President said, “I can’t remember all this shit.” He tried again, visibly concentrating, pausing after each number.
The monitor screen brightened. An outline of a hand appeared, with palm upward, fingers slightly spread and thumb to the left.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” said a cool and efficient female voice from a speaker slit along the bottom of the monitor. “Please verify.”
Beale placed his palm, fingers and thumb directly against the outline. The monitor blinked very quickly, like a picture being taken, and went dark again. “Thank you, sir,” said the voice.
The elevator doors opened. It was a large car, more than enough to hold a dozen people comfortably with space to spare. The numbers on the control panel went from One down to Five. When everyone was aboard, Beale pressed the Five button, the elevator doors closed, and they descended with a speed that made the stomach flip.
“You doing all right?” Dave asked Ethan.
Ethan nodded, but he was not. The body had been injured more severely than when he’d entered it. Though there’d been internal damage in that blast concussion there had been no fractured bones. The dark-haired woman with the boy—his mother, but that had to be concealed from him because it was better to let his mind work with questions rather than to be overcome with answers—had pulled him close. She and the four others had taken the full impact of a Cypher strike that had missed its Gorgon target. If the concussion of that blast in the strip mall had not ended the boy’s life, this surely would have done it. His left arm was dead and cold now from the shoulder down, but his broken ribs on that side were hurting him, and pain flared through the muscles along his spine. He felt the pressure of liquid in the lungs, a sensation that they were laboring. He had to cough into his free hand, and then he regarded the ugly red scrawl of blood cupped there.