The Border

Yet for all this, he was alone.

He was rarely summoned to intervene, but always for a cause that involved the death of a world by conquest. Sometimes the greater power that had created him did not summon him, but the vast network of information that he was tuned to told him civilizations were being destroyed by others either greedy, envious, or in a religious fervor. He understood that he was not called to intervene in the politics and progress of a world, but rather to keep a world from being destroyed by an external force. The Gorgons and Cyphers, their real names impossible for the humans to speak or understand, had been at war over unpopulated planets for eons. They had fought each other across space, over dead pieces of rock and worlds of ice and flame, but in all that time this Earth was the first populated world they had contested. Their self-proclaimed border between what they considered their territories passed directly through the planet.

It could not be allowed, that this world should be destroyed. And why? Was it so important, in the view of the greater power that the peacekeeper obeyed? He had wondered about this but had received no answer. In its silence, the greater power could be very cryptic at times, and also unsettling even to Ethan’s steady nature. He didn’t understand it, but he was not expected to. The ways and plans of the greater power were unknown to him; he was a small part of a massive undertaking that left even his thought processes numbed. He did what he was called to do, though it was left to him to decide the course of action. A test, as Dave had put it? A test of both himself and the will of the inhabitants of this world? He couldn’t say. There was some element of curiosity in the greater power as to how civilizations progressed, he knew that, but even to him, there were many mysteries that would never be revealed.

He kept watch on the trackers. The Cypher tracker remained at the edge of the atmosphere. The Gorgon warship kept its distance of around seventy miles. He had the feeling of many Gorgon eyes and Cypher sensors directed at the bus, as it moved slowly along the highway between cliffs banded with a dozen shades of red. They feared him, but they must have him. They would choose the time and place.

From a pocket of his jeans, Dave drew the many-times-folded and dirty Utah map torn from the road atlas. There were several mountains in the area to which they were headed; they’d have to figure out which one was the White Mansion, because he doubted very much that it would be marked with any kind of sign.

It was a slow progress southward. Hannah was afraid to push the engine or the tires too hard, but at least they were good for fuel. The land flattened out and then rose again toward a mountain range. What appeared to be rugged badlands stretched out on both sides. They passed the black hulks of a tractor-trailer truck and two cars that had collided in what must have been a terrible fireball, but otherwise the highway was empty.

Just after ten o’clock they passed through the center of the town of Monticello, which appeared to be deserted. Highway 191 became Main Street. Dave had given the map plenty of study and knew they had to get into the Manti-La-Sal National Forest, which was off to the west of Monticello. A smaller road, 101, was their way in. A weather-beaten sign in front of the post office at the corner of 191 and West 200 directed them to turn there for the National Forest. In another few minutes West 200 became Abajo Drive, which became 101 and began to climb toward the forested foothills.

Much of the forest had turned brown and died. Pine and birch trees stood bony and bare. Through them, as they continued to climb, Olivia caught sight to their left of a looming mountain with a peak of white stone. All the surrounding mountains were covered with a brown blanket of dead forests. “You see that?” she asked Dave, and pointed.

“I see it. Maybe ten miles away. I don’t know exactly how the hell to get there, but that looks promising. Ethan, is that the mountain?”

“I think it is,” Ethan answered. “It must be.”

“He can sense a spaceship seventy-two miles away and a tracker in outer space but he doesn’t know if that’s the right mountain or not, right in front of him,” Jefferson said. “Great.”

“The tracker is not in outer space,” Ethan corrected him. “As for the mountain, I only know what’s on Dave’s map.”

“There might not be a road,” Hannah said. The engine was straining as 101 steepened. “Looks pretty rugged over that way.”

“We’ll keep going until we can’t go any further,” Dave told her. “Then we’ll figure something else out.”

The road crested and the mountain was in full view. It might have been majestic but for many thousands of dead trees. It was definitely the only peak of white stone in sight. Then the road descended for a stretch, with diseased forests on either side, before it began to climb once more and took a turn to the left.

“She’s chuggin’,” Hannah said, but everyone could already feel the bus shuddering as it fought its way up. Again Highway 101 crested, with another swing to the south, and began a long winding journey down among the foothills from which the white-peaked mountain rose. Hannah was trying to put as light a foot on the brakes as possible, but she couldn’t allow the bus to get out of control descending this road. “I might be burnin’ the brakes up,” she worried. “They’re soggy enough already, and she’s pullin’ to the right.”

“You’re doing fine,” Dave said. He was alert for the smell of burning brakes, though; it would be a long way down if they gave out.

In about four miles or so 101 straightened out again and ran south parallel to the mountain in question. Everyone on the bus was looking for a way up, but there were only thousands of acres of brown trees unbroken by another road.

“I don’t see a way to get any closer,” Hannah said. “From here it’d be one hell of a walk.”

“Keep going,” Dave urged. “Could be a road up on the other side.”

Another two miles passed. A more narrow road branched off from 101 to the right, and Dave told Hannah to take that one. They began climbing again, though moving more to the northwest and away from the white rock peak. Dave said, “I’m not sure this is the way but let’s stick it out for awhile.”

They had traveled for over twenty minutes, seemingly going in the wrong direction, when Hannah caught sight of a dirt road that went off to the left on a more southwesterly course. It was surrounded by dead forest and was likely very hard to see when the trees were full. She slowed the bus and stopped near the road’s entrance. “What say?” she asked. “You want to try this? Might lead to a dead end, but it could take us a lot closer.”

“Yeah. Let’s try it.”

Hannah turned them onto the road and they started up again, leaving whorls of dust behind the tires. The bus jubbled over loose stones, which put them all on edge. A little more than two hundred yards up the road, they came to a chainlink fence about eight feet high. It was topped by a coil of barbed wire, and the fence went in both directions through the woods as far as they could see.

On the gate, which bore a sturdy-looking padlock, was a sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING.

They sat with the engine idling. “What do you think, bossman?” Hannah asked.

“I think it’s strange. This is a national forest. How can it be private property?”

“Don’t know, but that’s what the sign says.”

“Yeah.” Dave turned to look at Ethan. “What do you think?”

The expression was determined and the silver eyes were intense. “I think we need to go through that gate.”

Dave nodded. “There’s no such thing as private property anymore, is there? Odd, though, to be in a national forest. Hannah, can you push us through?”

“I could, but I don’t want to. Get anything tangled up underneath or blow the tires…wouldn’t be good.”

“I’ll do it.” Ethan stood up. Hannah opened the door for him and he stepped off the bus. As the others watched, it took maybe ten seconds for the peacekeeper to take aim at the gate with the palm of his right hand and the entire gate to separate from its padlock and chain and go flying through the air; in midair it curved and sailed into the woods on the right. The coil of barbed wire hung down over the entrance but would only scratch a little paint off the bus. Ethan came back aboard and returned to his seat as if the merest amount of energy had been required, though he was opening and closing a hand whose bones and tendons throbbed with a dull ache.

“Easy enough,” Hannah said. “I wish I could’ve done that to my ex-husband. All right, we’re movin’.”

She drove them through. They had taken two curves, still ascending, when another fence blocked the road. It was not made of chainlink; it was at least six feet high and made of what appeared to be a gridwork of thin white wires. Again Hannah stopped the bus before a padlocked gate, because she knew what it was even as Dave said it out loud.

“That’s an electric fence. Damn…somebody doesn’t want people going up this road, that’s for sure.”

“Which means,” Olivia said, “there’s something up there that’s supposed to stay hidden.”

“Right. Well…Ethan, can you knock that gate down?”

“I can,” Ethan said, “but I think you should know that the electricity has been activated.”

“No way!” said Jefferson. “All the power’s knocked out, and why would anybody use up gas for a generator to run that thing?”

“Power is running through the fence and the gate. I can feel the movement of energy. Touching that would be enough to kill any human.”

No one spoke for a moment. Dave scratched his beard and saw that, like the chainlink fence, this one also extended into the forest on both sides as far as could be seen. He thought it was likely the fence went around the entire mountain. Somebody had gone to great lengths and great expense to protect their property, but why?

“We have to keep going,” Ethan said. “I’ll open the gate.” He got off the bus again and made another ten seconds’ work of the gate, breaking it open and folding it back against the fence so no wires were torn. It was a minimal use of his power. He was keenly aware of the sensation of being watched by something other than the Cypher and Gorgon trackers, and scanning the trees he quickly made out two small optical devices in the branches up over his head, painted in gray camouflage. They were both aimed directly at the gate. He assumed someone had just witnessed an action that would immediately cause alarms to go off.

“There are cameras in the trees,” he reported when he got back aboard. “Two that I saw, probably more. I would think someone knows we’re here, and they’re not going to like it.”

With a hard edge in his voice, Dave said, “No reason to stop now. Let’s go on.”

Ethan returned to his seat. Hannah started them forward again and didn’t breathe easily until they were way past the fence. The road steepened in its ascent and once more the bus chugged, the tires struggling for traction in the dust and stones. After a hard pull of perhaps a quarter of a mile they came to a place where the dead trees fell away and above them towered the mountain’s white peak. The road leveled off. Directly ahead it ended at a guardrail overlooking the valley below, with a solid wall of white stone to their right.

Hannah stopped about ten feet from the guardrail. “This is as far as we go, folks.”

They sat in silence, as the hot engine ticked.

“What now?” Jefferson asked. “There’s nothing here!”

“You’re wrong,” Dave said, standing up. “That guardrail…what’s it up here for? To keep a car from going over, so somebody’s been driving that road. Damned if I know, but I can’t see anyplace wide enough to turn around and it would be mighty tough to back down. Which says to me that—”

“Stay where you are,” came a man’s magnified voice from a loudspeaker. “If you step off that, bus you will be executed. Repeat: stay where you are.”

The voice was flat, calm, and deadly in its resolve. It was the voice of a trained professional who Dave figured would have no qualms putting everyone on the bus to death. Whoever it was, he had a big surprise coming.

And then Dave finished what he was saying, as a section of the rock wall at least ten feet wide began to tilt inward and open up on smooth and nearly soundless machinery. “Which says to me that there’s a way in, and it’s big enough for a car.”

Twenty-Seven.

“Are they going to kill us?” Nikki asked, her voice trembling.

Five men with weapons had emerged from the opening doorway in the white stone. Three wore regular t-shirts and jeans and carried automatic rifles, one wore gray trousers and a pale blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves and the fifth was dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and a gray-striped tie. Both these men were carrying automatic pistols. The one in the suit was a black man with close-cropped hair and the one wearing the gray trousers was Asian. All were maybe in their late twenties or early thirties, were clean-shaven, healthy in appearance, and moved quickly. They looked to Dave like very capable killers. They came toward the bus with what appeared to be deadly intent.

“Open up,” said the man in the suit, who seemed to be the leader. He was used to issuing commands; his voice, though not necessarily loud, carried the demand for instant obedience. He took aim at Hannah through the door’s glass. “I will repeat that once, ma’am: open up.”

The others had taken up stations at various points around the bus. All the weapons were trained on the passengers.

“Open it,” Dave said.

Hannah did. The black man came aboard, followed by one of the others with an automatic rifle. “Stand up, ma’am. Leave the key in the ignition and your weapon in the seat and move back.” She obeyed, realizing this was not a man to be messed with. “The rest of you stay very still.” He was holding his pistol in a two-handed grip. His deep-set, olive-colored eyes darted here and there, taking everything in; they stopped on Ethan and remained there for a few seconds before he went on. “You’re going to move slowly now and put your weapons in the aisle. If I don’t like a quick movement, I will kill you. Everyone tell me they understand that.”

Everyone told him, except Ethan who remained silent and watchful. The black man’s wary gaze kept coming back to Ethan, but both the pistol and the rifle were aimed along the aisle so as to swing fast upon anyone they chose to target.

The guns were laid in the aisle. “Thank you,” the man said. “Now folks…you are all going to put your hands behind your head and you are going to walk off this bus single file. Again, I don’t like quick movements and neither do the agents outside. So be very, very careful as you leave and we’ll have no problem. When you get off the bus, you’ll be told what to do.”

Jefferson had heard something that snagged in his head. “Agents? What kind of agents?”

“Secret Service, sir. Now…I want no talking, either. Everyone just be quiet, move carefully and slowly and follow instructions.”

When they got outside, the man in the suit urged everyone along toward the entrance into the White Mansion, which was not only big enough to admit a car, but probably big enough to let a tank rumble through. He stopped Ethan by putting an arm in his way. Ethan kept his hands behind his head as instructed.

“Will, take them all inside,” the man told the Asian. “You just stand where you are,” he said to Ethan.

“Listen,” said Olivia, “we have a lot to tell you.”

“I’m sure you do, and we have a lot of questions to ask you as well. Please go along with the others now. Don, stick here with me for a minute.” One of the men armed with an automatic rifle took a position just beside Ethan.

“Sir, would you tell me your name?” Ethan asked, as his friends were escorted through the opening.

“Bennett Jackson. Yours?”

“Ethan Gaines. Mr. Jackson, I need to tell you that there is a Gorgon warship about forty miles northeast of this position and moving closer. I don’t know if they’re preparing an attack or not, but it would be wise to be ready if possible.”

“A human-looking boy with silver eyes who talks like a fifty-year-old man. That’s a first. Are you a Cypher?”

“No sir.”

“The cameras saw you destroy two gates without a weapon. How’d you do that?”

“I am a weapon,” Ethan said. “May I put my hands down? This is an uncomfortable posture.”

“Frisk him,” Jackson told the other man. It was done quickly and efficiently. Eye contact was kept during the procedure. “Okay Ethan, you can put your hands down.” Jackson looked toward the milky sky to the northeast and then back to the boy. “You’re not a Gorgon or a Cypher—you say—but you’re not human, either. You say you’re a weapon, and I believe what I’ve seen. So what side are you a weapon for?”

“Your side.”

“Uh-huh.” Jackson gave him a thin, cold smile absolutely devoid of humor. “I have seen a lot of things I would never have believed possible two years ago. My wife and my six-year-old daughter are likely dead, back in Washington.” Flames flickered in the olive-green eyes; they were highly dangerous, but they didn’t last long. Ethan knew this man kept his emotions in a tightly sealed box, for fear that letting anything out might tear him to pieces. The loss of his wife had solidified Jackson’s marriage to his job, which Ethan saw in an instant had been a constant demand to him and a point of pride. There were the memories in there of a rough background in a rough neighborhood, scenes of hard military training and a medal of some kind being presented to him. “At least,” Jackson continued, “I hope they died before things got really bad. You’re some kind of creature made by either the Gorgons or the Cyphers, is what I think. You have to be. Are you bringing the Gorgons here? Is that what this is about?”

“No, it’s not.”

“How did you find this place?”

Ethan traveled across the tortured landscape of Bennett Jackson’s mind. He saw within seconds what this mountain held.

“This is the secure location for the President,” Ethan said. “And he’s here.”

“You’ve come to kill him? Or guide the ship in to kill everyone?”

“No. As my friend Olivia said, we have a lot to tell you.”

Jackson removed a small black communications device from within his coat. It had a keypad on it and a yellow, green and red button. He pressed the red one. “Waiting for instructions,” he said into the speaker. Then, to Ethan, “If I took you inside without permission they’d put me in a rubber room before I was shot.”

“If someone here doesn’t listen to me,” said Ethan calmly, “there will be no more they for you to be involved with, if you’re speaking of your human race. The Cyphers and Gorgons won’t stop fighting until this planet is destroyed. Even then they might not stop. Mr. Jackson, I’m here to help you and I’ve come a very long way. Please take me to your President.”

Jackson scanned the northeastern sky once more. A muscle clenched in his jaw. “How do you know the warship’s out there?”

“I can feel its harmonic signature getting stronger.”

“Its what?”

“The composition of its matter sends out a frequency. A vibrational signal I can pick up. All matter does this. The Gorgon ships are easily recognizable from this signal.”

Jackson just stood there like a statue, staring at him.

Ethan finally tapped his skull and said, “I have a radar in here.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jackson said, and narrowed his eyes. “What’re we going to do with you?”

“The wise thing, I hope,” Ethan answered.

Bennett Jackson wore an expression of dismay. He looked to the other man, Don, for some kind of help and got only a shrug. He then seemed to be searching all points of the compass for something to steady his own course. He rubbed at a spot on his forehead as if trying to make the gears in his brain mesh a little better.

A voice came from the communications device: “Bring him in. Room 5A.”

“All right, Ethan,” Jackson said. “Now when we go inside, you’re not going to turn into a creature I’ll have to kill, will you? I would dislike putting a bullet into the head of anything that looks like a human boy, but I’ll do it in an instant. Also, there will be men inside who’ll shoot you to pieces even if you’re quick enough to kill me. So be careful in your movements and walk ahead of me, and I would ask that you return your hands to the back of your head, fingers locked together, and everyone will feel much better. Agreed?”

“Yes,” Ethan said. He did as Jackson told him, and walked toward the opening with Jackson two paces behind him and the other man with the automatic rifle just off to his left.

They entered the White Mansion. The initial chamber looked like a spotless high-tech garage forty feet wide, with a shiny black-painted concrete floor and a ceiling about twenty feet high. Tubes of light ran along the ceiling amid industrial-looking pipes. A metal staircase ascended to a second level. Three black SUVs and a jeep were parked on the garage floor. There were gas pumps, both regular fuel and diesel, a supply of oil drums, tires in racks and batteries on shelves. Ethan saw that his traveling companions had already been spirited away somewhere, and ten or so men—some dressed informally, some in suits, but all clean-shaven and well-fed—had gathered to watch the entrance of the new arrivals, and he figured especially himself. Among them were two uniformed and helmeted soldiers with machine guns. Ethan sensed the low hum of power and felt a great source of energy here, and it both perplexed and interested him.

“What’s running your power?” he asked.

Jackson ignored him so completely Ethan couldn’t even read the man’s mind on the subject. Jackson called over one of the jeans-clad Secret Service agents who’d returned to the area and told him to get a detail and clean the bus out of guns and whatever else was on there, but not to bring the bus inside until that order was given. Then Ethan was marched up the metal stairs by Jackson and the man named Don, along a corridor and to another set of stairs that led up to a beige-carpeted area of closed doors. Jackson unlocked a door marked 5A with a key from a keyring, reached in and flipped on a light switch. He stepped back as Ethan entered. It was a single room with a bed, a dresser, a writing table, lamp and chair and beyond that a small white-tiled bathroom. The wallpaper showed artwork of eagles in flight. There were no windows, since they were well inside the mountain. Cool air was circulating from a wall vent. Jackson closed the door and he and the other man took positions on either side of it.

“You’re going to have a visitor in a few minutes,” Jackson said. “He’ll be very interested to hear your story.”

“That’s fine.” Ethan looked up at the overhead tube-light and the lamp on the table before he sat down on the bed. “You have a lot of power available here. What’s the source?”

Jackson again would not answer, but Ethan got the flicker of a mental image from him: a bright glowing piece of white crystal about the size of a man’s hand, suspended in a transparent cylinder and slowly revolving. Cables ran from the base of the cylinder into machinery in a room that felt to Ethan to be on a lower level below the garage.

Ethan was about to remark on this when the door opened and a man in a gray suit entered, accompanied by another man in a dark blue uniform and cap with many multi-colored bars over his heart. The man in the gray suit wore a white shirt and a blue-patterned tie, he was clean-shaven and slim but healthy in appearance. He looked combative, as if he’d lived every day with his teeth clenched, his lower jaw jutting out just a little too much. He was bald but for a fringe of light brown hair with gray at the temples. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, and his eyes were so pale blue, they were nearly colorless. On his lapel was an American flag pin. The pallid eyes took Ethan in with absolutely no expression on his face, but the military man behind him had a start and actually backed up a pace before Jackson closed the door.

“Sir, this is Ethan Gaines,” Jackson announced. “He tells me he is neither Cypher nor Gorgon, but he does admit to being an alien weapon in the form of a human boy. He says there’s a Gorgon warship closing in from the northeast. He also says he’s—”

“I’ll take it from here, thank you,” said the man in the gray suit, with a quick, clipped manner of speech that Ethan thought could easily become abrasive. “Ethan, why don’t our radars pick this ship up?”

“They have cloaking devices that easily hide them from your systems. May I ask what your name is, and your position?” Vance Derryman, Chief of Staff, came the mental response.

“We’re not here to interview me.”

“All right, Mr. Derryman,” Ethan said. “As chief of staff you have immediate access to the President. May I speak with him?”

It was a moment before Derryman answered, and when he did it was with a thin-lipped smile. His eyes were even more cautious than before. He brought from a pocket a communications device like the one Jackson had used. He pressed a sequence on the keyboard. “Ambler Seven Seven,” he said quietly. “Go to code yellow and scan to the northeast. Also get a team of eyes up top.” He waited for a voice to answer, “Copy that, sir,” and then he put the device away. Ethan picked up Weapons Control from someone. He glanced at the military man, who was scared to death of him, and got the name Winslett, first name Patrick, nicknamed Foggy for some reason. Oh…he used to chain-smoke so much he carried around his own fogbank. Derryman took a seat in the chair and folded his hands together. Then he simply stared at Ethan as if trying out his own powers of mental perception.

“I guess,” Ethan said to the silence, “that my friends have been put in separate rooms and they’re also being interviewed?” He knew it was true, so he went on. “You’ll get the same story from everyone, but please listen closely to what Dave McKane and Olivia Quintero will explain. Also you’ll find Jefferson Jericho of interest. He’s had occasion to be in the presence of the Gorgon queen.”

The silence remained unbroken, but Foggy Winslett looked as nervous as if he expected either Ethan to grow two heads and six arms at any instant, or the roof to crash in on his skull.

“How close is the Gorgon ship now?” Derryman asked, almost as if posing a casual question.

Ethan spent a few seconds in concentration. The mass of this mountain was a little interference, though not enough to mask the ship from him. “Thirty miles, but it’s holding its position.”

“You’re telling them to hold there?”

“No. As you’ll learn from the others, I am a threat to both Gorgons and Cyphers. I want this war to be ended, sir. They don’t understand what I am, and they both want to either capture me, take me apart on their dissection tables, or kill me. I believe they’re thinking they can harness my energy in some way to create new weapons.”

“Your energy,” said Derryman. He nodded. “I’ve seen that in action on the visual feed. Tell me, then…what are you, and why should you want the war to be ended?”

“I have a question to ask you first, before we go any further.” Ethan had been unaware of what he might find here, but his realization of what was running the power at this installation had given him a clue. “Your power source here is not of human design. Where did it come from?”

Derryman hesitated. Ethan could read his mind, but he wanted to hear it, and he knew Derryman was a very intelligent man who fully understood that.

“You’re correct. It’s of alien design. And you knew about that, how?”

“Mr. Jackson didn’t realize he was telling me when I asked.”

“Of course. Well, that’s a very interesting ability you have there, Ethan. I like the silver eyes. They’re a little disconcerting at first, but impressive. I’m assuming there’s some reason for that, maybe you can see a spectrum we can’t?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing is purposeless in the universe, is it? The crystal that powers everything here—and seems to the physicists who have studied it to have unlimited power—comes from Area 51,” Derryman said. “Do you know what that is?”

The knowledge of that, sketchy at best, was in the boy’s brain, but Ethan wanted to hear Derryman’s explanation of it. “I am aware that this planet has been visited many times by other civilizations. I’d like you to tell me the details.”

“Sir,” Winslett said tersely, “I would advise that you—”

“I hear your advice, General, and it is noted.” Derryman’s eyes never left Ethan. “I think our visitor here could pick out every detail of Area 51 from your mind or mine anyway. He’s being gracious in not tromping around in our heads. Also he wants to hear an earthman’s understanding of it. Am I correct there, Ethan?”

“Yes sir.”

“This is the point where I ought to stand up and walk out of here,” Derryman said. “I ought to consider you a threat of the highest magnitude and figure out some way to dispose of you, but that might be a little difficult. It also might be the wrong choice. I’m thinking that you’re an energy source yourself, and you’ve incorporated a human body? Or is that a manufactured form?”

“A human body,” Ethan replied. “I regret that the boy is gone, but it had to be done.”

“Vance, I need a drink,” Winslett said. Sweat glistened on his forehead and his dark brown, defeated eyes looked bloodshot already.

“Area 51,” Derryman said, “is in New Mexico, about five hundred miles from here. It’s a base where new fighter and surveillance aircraft are created and tested. There’s a section of Area 51, called S-4, that holds what used to be lead and silver mines in the 1870s. Those mines have now been occupied, modernized, and powered as an interlocked research center. We research there any alien mechanism, device, or flesh we can get our hands on. This has been going on for over sixty years. Needless to say we’ve learned a lot we’ve been trying to keep other countries from knowing. Russia had its own program and a few other countries with the right facilities and the luck to get hold of an alien craft or artifact did as well. All that is the worst-kept secret in the world, because we can’t control all the sightings or the crashes. And let me ask you this while I can, Ethan: if the aliens who have been able to reach us have such fantastic machines, why do they sometimes crash? We’ve helped a couple come down by pilots who got scared enough to fire missiles at close range without the proper authority, but we’ve seen four crashes that seem to be mechanical error. Why is that?”

“Intricate machinery no matter how advanced can sometimes fail, no matter what the propulsion system or the intelligence behind it. That’s true all across the cosmos.”

“My God,” said Derryman, as if he’d just realized the enormity of the moment. “I’m sitting here talking to an entity who can answer the questions.” He looked at Jackson and Don, who both were stoic, and then to Winslett who appeared shaken and in desperate need of his drink. For a moment Derryman seemed about to be overcome, and then he got himself under control once more, and the hard-souled, tough-minded ex-lawyer from Connecticut came back. “Now answer my questions: what are you, where are you from and if you’re neither Gorgon nor Cypher why do you have any interest in stopping their war?”

“I am…” Ethan thought JayDee had captured it best. “I am a peacekeeper, comparable to the soldiers of your United Nations. I’ve come from a great distance. My interest in stopping their war is to save your world.” Something was intruding on his mental flow…what was it? He realized in another few seconds. “Another Gorgon warship has joined the first. A third is within sixty miles, approaching from the west. There’s a fourth…over a hundred miles away yet, coming from the southeast, but slowly. What weapons do you have?”

“ERAM surface-to-air missiles, fired remotely from a launcher up top about two hundred feet. A second launcher firing Patriots, and two radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns on rotating turrets at the peak.” Derryman paused, and Ethan knew what he was going to ask next but did not interrupt. “Will it be enough?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Those weapons were designed to knock down enemy aircraft built by humans, not those things.” Derryman stood up; in spite of his steady demeanor and the movement of cool air in the room, a sheen of sweat glistened on his head. “Foggy, you and I need to get the other officers together.”

“Area 51,” Ethan said. “There are many alien artifacts there, removed from the ships?”

“As I understand.”

“And weapons?”

“I’ve never been there. My briefing didn’t give me the details of the layout. I really didn’t want to know.”

“Did your briefing tell you how to get in?”

Derryman was slow in replying. “Now why would you want to do that, Ethan?”

“Obviously, your weapons are not sufficient. I’m not sure, but something might be there I can use.”

That statement caused silence to fall again. Derryman studied the knuckles of his right hand and then his closely trimmed fingernails.

“You’re going to have to trust me,” Ethan said.

Derryman looked up and asked sharply, “Are we?”

“Your world is on the brink of destruction right now. I’m your best hope, but I believe you’re coming to that conclusion yourself.”

“Quite a supposition, that we should trust any alien lifeform.”

“Your choices,” Ethan said, his silver eyes aimed like energy beams at Vance Derryman, “are limited. Your time is limited too. No, that’s not a threat, sir. It’s reality. Do you want to think about this for awhile? I’d like to at least have the chance to offer the idea to your President.”

Derryman stared back at Ethan. His facial expression and cold eyes gave the others no clue as to what he was thinking but Ethan knew he was just as frightened as Foggy Winslett.

At last Derryman sat down again. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again he said, “General Winslett, you have my authority to detail to this individual any information you have concerning Area 51.”

“Vance…listen…I don’t think we—”

“Do it,” came the command, and it was final.

H

Winslett’s red-veined cheeks and nose already spoke of an intimate relationship with a supply of mind-numbing whiskey. His uniform and position did not shield him from terrors in the night.

He began, with an obvious effort and a distaste for the order. “I have been there,” he said, as he stared at the beige carpet. “The base was evacuated two years ago. A security system would’ve automatically gone on-line. That’s also powered by alien technology, so it’s still active. The place is sealed up tight. Any try at breaking in would trigger defense mechanisms and ultimately blow the S-4 site to pieces. There’s a nuclear device buried underneath it. I don’t have the code to open the complex. The Vice President did. The Secretary of Defense had it, but I understand his plane went down over Virginia. The officials and scientists in the research group had blue badge clearances. They’re all missing.”

“The President has it,” Ethan said.

“He does. The code gets you in, but to go deeper requires a handprint against a recognition scanner on every level.”

“I believe I need to get inside and see what’s there. As I asked before, may I offer this idea to the President?”

Derryman and the military man exchanged glances, and Ethan knew.

“There’s something wrong with the President,” he said. “Mentally wrong?”

After a hesitation, Derryman said, “He comes and goes. He’s tried to commit suicide twice. One was last week, with sleeping pills. He…doesn’t know the full scope of what’s happened. We’ve kept it from him so he doesn’t crack completely. The First Lady keeps it from him too.”

“And the only way into the research area at S-4 without triggering the defense system is with his handprint.” It was not a question from the peacekeeper, but a statement.

“Correct. We can’t risk the President leaving this facility. He would lose his mind if he really knew, and we need him…as a symbol, if nothing else. We give him false military news. Hopeful news, Ethan, to keep him sane.” Derryman stood up again. The interview was over. He said to Jackson, “You two stay with our visitor for awhile. You’re not a prisoner, Ethan, but we would all appreciate it if you would confine yourself to this room until we get ourselves in order.”

Ethan was aware of something else now, another sensation, another set of harmonic signatures from which he drew a mental picture. His human heartbeat quickened. “I have to tell you…the Gorgon ships are converging but keeping their range…and…there are two…three…four…Cypher warships taking up position ninety…eighty-six miles to the south. Not the small Cypher craft. These are battleships. Very big.”

“Thank you for that.” Derryman sounded a little choked. “We may need your help in weapons control if our radars can’t pick up any targets. In the meantime…welcome to the White Mansion.”

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.

The creature drew back, swatting at the air with its foreclaws. From its cavernous mouth beneath the bony battering ram came a shriek that started loud and grew in high-pitched intensity until it broke the windows in the SUVs and caused everyone in the garage to drop their weapons and clasp their hands to their ears. A couple of the soldiers fell to their knees. Ethan too had to protect his ears; the sound was mind-stunning, an aural assault that could break the will of any human to stand before it. When the sound ceased the weapons were grabbed up again and the firing continued, but two of the soldiers and three of the other men had fallen to the floor and lay there in dazed shock.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” Winslett shouted. Even to Ethan the man’s voice was muffled, his ears still ringing with the creature’s sonic weapon.

The beast’s flesh was oozing dark fluid in a hundred places. Its tail lashed out and knocked one SUV into the others. Facing the humans it let out a second shriek that again drove aural spikes of pain into the head and overpowered the senses. This time Derryman was driven to his knees, and Winslett staggered back with his hands clutched to his ears. Jackson tried to withstand it and keep firing but he couldn’t; the pistol fell from his grip and he went down also. Ethan was staggered too, his hands to his ears and feeling as if his entire body was enveloped in searing flame. It came to him, even in the midst of this torment, that the creature’s sonic shrieks were not only at a mind-stunning pitch and volume but triggered the area of the human nervous system that registered pain. He fell to his knees and then onto his right side, his teeth clenched and eyes involuntarily squeezed shut. In spite of all the power he commanded, he drew his knees up against his chest, and his body shivered as agony beat at him in vicious waves.

H

Dave had felt a vibration in Room 3A and so had the man with the automatic rifle who’d been stationed there to guard him. “What the hell was that?” he asked. An alarm was still going off, after the sound of a gunshot which a few moments before had caused Dave to emerge from the bathroom where he’d gone to get a drink of water.

“Saber Four Eight,” the man said into his communicator. “What’s happening, Jonesy?”

“We’re at Code Red on Level Two,” came the terse and nervous answer. “Some kind of breach. Sketchy yet.”

“Do tell,” Dave said.

“Can’t talk, I’m gone,” said the man on the other end of the communicator, and Dave’s guard replied, “Copy that.”

“A breach?” Dave felt the floor shudder again. “Whatever’s gotten in, it’s big.”

“Just relax. Our orders are to sit tight.”

“Relax? Are you crazy? When do I get to see somebody who’s able to listen to me?”

“Sir, now is not the time to—”

“It is the time.” Dave took a step toward the door and his guard swung the rifle’s barrel up into his face. Dave looked into the barrel with disgust and then into the man’s eyes with the same expression. “I’m going out to see what the hell is happening. If you want to go, fine. If you want to shoot me, go right ahead because that’s the only way you’ll keep me in this room.”

“Sir, my orders are clear.” A finger went to the trigger.

Once again a vibration came through the floor. The alarm was still wailing. Dave said, “Shoot me if you have to.” He reached out to turn the door’s lock the guard had engaged and the young, hard-faced Secret Service agent stepped in front of him with the rifle still aimed at his head. Dave had the urge to throw a punch, but he thought as soon as he drew his fist back he would likely be shot, not a killing placement but one to the leg or shoulder that would instantly drop him.

A voice came from the man’s comm device: “Mike, Code Red on Level Two! They need guns! Get down there, stat!”

“I’m watching one of the new arrivals!”

“Scrub that! Leave ’em locked in and get down there!”

“You’re not lockin’ me in!” Dave said. “No way! I’ll kick that damned door down!”

“Copy that.” The agent lowered his communicator but kept the rifle aimed. “Step back, sir.”

“I’m going through that door one way or the other. I swear I’ll kick it down. Shoot me now, if you have to.”

The young man paused, his well-scrubbed face impassive. Then suddenly it became contorted with conflict. “Damn it!” he said. “You must be human, to be so fucking stubborn!” He unlocked the door. “I may be put in the brig for this, but come on and stay out of my way!”

They went into the corridor, where they found that Jefferson Jericho had used his skills to also talk his guard into letting him out of 1A. Jefferson and the young man were just coming through the door. Dave figured Jericho’s guard had been informed of the need for guns too, and the slimebag didn’t want to be left in that room while it felt like the place was falling to pieces.

The two guards rushed on along the corridor to the stairs. “What’s going on?” Jefferson asked Dave over the noise of the alarm.

“Some kind of breach downstairs.”

“A breach? What’s gotten in?”

“Don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s making the floor—”

Dave caught a strange movement, like a disturbance of air to Jefferson’s left and about eight feet further toward the stairs. Dave felt the skin on the back of his neck crawl. Above the shrill noise of the alarm something made a sound whose echo came up the stairwell and along the corridor and made both men wince with pain.

From the shimmer of air, a body formed.

It was a large man, square-built and broad-shouldered though his cheekbones and small ebony chips of eyes were hollowed out from hunger. He had a tangle of shoulder-length black hair and two month’s growth of beard. He wore a dark blue t-shirt, gray trousers and dirty black sneakers.

Vope said, tonelessly, “I have come for the boy, but I have been given permission to know ecstasy in killing both of you first.”

H

When the monster ceased its aural attack, Ethan got to his knees. His body was aflame, it was hard to focus beyond the pain and the feeling that his brain was about to explode. He saw the creature stalking toward them, crouched under the ceiling. Its triangular head shattered some of the light tubes, and the forked tail swept back and forth across the concrete, now hitting the oil drums and sending them flying into the shelves where the batteries were stored.

The soldiers were paralyzed, unable to pick up their weapons. Jackson was on the ground and so were Derryman and General Winslett, all of them in agony. There were other men on the stairs. They stopped where they were to fire automatic rifles at the beast, and though the bullets drew puffs of alien blood, they did nothing to halt the thing’s advance.

Before the creature could deliver another assault the peacekeeper took aim, both hands outthrust. With a concentrated thought that cut through the pain, he sent bolts of crackling energy and a thousand fiery projectiles that only he could see toward the monster at nearly the speed of light. The beast was hit in the chest, which burned black in an instant and caved in, then burst into flame. The thing staggered backward, the tail crashed into one of the SUVs and sent it tumbling end-over-end into the opposite wall not a dozen feet from Ethan and the others. As its chest burned, the monster let loose another sonic scream, the power of which was nearly a physical force that flung Ethan backward to the floor and stopped all firing of rifles from the men on the stairs.

Through the haze of pain and pressure, Ethan saw the beast lurching forward once more, its chest dripping chunks of flaming meat. It was coming to crush him and the other men, and Ethan could not focus on fighting back with this unearthly scream pounding him down. Still he tried to get to his knees, to turn his power upon the oncoming monster, and still the shriek went on, exploding more of the light tubes along the garage’s roof.

H

In the corridor above, Jefferson spoke one word to Dave.

“Run.”

Vope’s face rippled, as if his mask was about to fall away. In the space of time it had taken for Jefferson to speak the word, Vope’s right arm had become a mottled, scaly yellow thing striped with black and brown. The hand was no longer a hand but a yellow spike covered with smaller black spikes, each one barbed and writhing.

Vope took two strides toward them and the deadly appendage shot forward as Jefferson and Dave retreated. Jefferson saw the arm lengthening and the spike coming at his chest with ferocious power. He realized he was going to be hit, even if he turned to run it was going to get him in the back…

…and then the door of 2A opened between them and intercepted the Gorgon’s arm, the spike smashing through the door in a shower of wood splinters. There was a shout of terror from the Secret Service agent who was coming out, as the alien weapon had narrowly missed cleaving through his own chest. He had an instant to fully recognize the threat, turn his rifle upon the creature and get off three shots to the area where a human heart would be before the left arm with its black reptilian head and metallic fangs seized his skull and crushed it. Within the room, Hannah saw the young man’s brains explode from his head and she dove like an Olympian into the bathroom, where she locked the door and pulled the shower curtain down over herself in the tub.

Between Dave, Jefferson, and Vope the other doors opened and two agents, alerted by the gunshots, came out with their rifles ready. “Shoot it!” Dave shouted. One man seemed transfixed at the sight of a creature whose arms snaked along the corridor, but the other got off two bullets that blew pieces out of Vope’s forehead. What appeared to be human blood streamed down the alien’s face. The shots had exposed something pulsating and malignant-looking within the wounds, like the misshapen knuckles of a leprous hand being clenched and unclenched.

The seething spike-arm had been withdrawn, and now it lunged forward again at the man who’d shot holes in Vope’s head, but this human was more canny and quicker than the wretched ones Jefferson had seen slaughtered in Fort Collins. The man dodged aside and the spike crashed once more through the door at his back. The other agent had regained his senses and started firing with his own rifle at a distance of only a few feet. A bullet struck Vope’s lower jaw and tore it away, a slug pierced his throat, and another ripped a chunk from his left cheek. The snake-head flailed out even as the spike-hand was retracted, but from where they stood further along the corridor behind the safety of the two rifles, Dave and Jefferson saw that Vope’s actions were out of control. The snakehead’s metallic fangs bit the Celotex ceiling tiles and the spike-hand did not fully retract but lay on the beige carpeting like a defeated python.

As the first Secret Service agent began firing again, aiming once more at Vope’s head and piercing it with bullet after bullet, the Gorgon’s ruined face rippled and contorted, one eye shot out and the nose a hole through which the hideous alien tissue pulsated.

Vope turned and fled for the stairway, dragging the spike-hand on the floor. The two agents pursued at a fast walk, side by side, both firing at the figure that staggered and retreated before them.

From below came the echo of an ear-piercing shriek that caused both agents to stop in their tracks, stunned even by the reverberation. Dave and Jefferson felt a knife-jab of pain at their eardrums and a feeling of flame burning along the spine. Dave was speechless, but he knew that whatever was going on down there, it was bad. Vope disappeared into the stairwell, and the two agents cautiously followed.

There came the sound of a crash of metal from the garage level and again the floor trembled. Jefferson yelled, “I’m going up!” He ran for another stairwell at the far end of the corridor, thinking to get as much space as he could between himself and what was attacking the level below.

Dave let him go. His concern was the condition of his friends. The echo of that shriek came rolling up the stairwell and along the corridor once more. This time the pain was so strong at eardrums and spine—like a flame scorching his nerves—he fell against the wall and clasped his hands to his ears. He made his way into the nearest room, seeking any of his companions and also shelter for himself.

H

In the garage, the burning monster’s scream was shrill and strong enough to shred a brain and destroy all will to resist. Ethan’s human senses were overcome, his pain equally as severe as any of the men who lay nearly unconscious around him. He felt the floor shake as the creature came toward them, its claws extended to rend whatever flesh they seized upon.

The beast’s shriek stopped, but the memory of it still inflamed Ethan’s brain and body. The soldiers and other men were completely helpless. Ethan struggled to his knees with a massive effort, his vision clouded by a red mist. Though its chest area was burning away and liquified meat spattered onto the concrete, the monster was almost upon them. He thought it would tear the humans apart and this body too, regardless of how much the Gorgons wanted him alive.

The peacekeeper thrust both hands forward in what might have been a final attempt to blast the creature to pieces.

Through the jangled and jittery pain, he realized something was behind him.

He turned his head to see what he thought he recognized as Jack Vope staggering toward him, but a Vope whose human face was nearly destroyed and covered with counterfeit blood. The Gorgon’s arms were misshapen lengths of mottled tissue that hung from the sleeves of his blood-wet t-shirt and dragged on the floor. They were changing from an approximation of human flesh and human hands to a bristle of spikes and a distorted reptilian head and then back again.

Ethan tore his focus away from that grotesque sight. From the aiming points of both palms he sent white missiles of energy at the head of the monster that loomed over him. Behind his teeth was locked an all-too-human scream.

The beast’s head burst into flame and then swelled and exploded, pieces flying through the rank and smoky air. Its hind legs crumpled and the headless body crashed down upon one of the SUVs and the jeep, smashing both vehicles to junk.

One of Vope’s elongated arms had a human hand at the end of it with six fingers and two thumbs, while the other still bore the snake’s head. The hand flopped about like a dying fish as the Gorgon’s damaged braincore tried to command it to grip hold of Ethan’s neck.

From the opposite wall of the battered garage, Ethan saw the emergence of four ghostly figures. The seven-foot-tall, spindly Cypher soldiers took solid form within a heartbeat, and the one who had come through first fired his blaster with no hesitation. Twin fireballs flew over Ethan and hit Vope squarely in the midsection. Ethan looked back to see the Gorgon falling, on fire with an eye-searing red flame and torn nearly in half, but just before the body hit the floor it began to shimmer and fade out, and when it did hit the floor it was almost transparent. Then there was just the dark aura left, the faintest impression of a body imprinted upon the air, and that too faded away and was gone.

The Queen saved him, Ethan thought, his mind dazed and seemingly every fiber of this body on fire. She took him back where they could make him whole again.

Now he had to turn his disjointed focus upon the four Cypher soldiers striding across the bloody concrete toward him. He knew they were there as Vope had been, to take him to a chamber where their dissection blades would destroy this body in their quest to find out what he was and how he could be used.

He could not permit that. No. Could not.

His ears were still ringing but over that noise he heard the faint pop pop pop of what he realized were gunshots. He looked back and saw that two more men with rifles had come down the metal stairs and were on their bellies on the concrete, firing at the Cyphers. Jackson had also gotten to his knees, and though his ears were bleeding and his eyes were bloodshot and swollen he was taking steady aim and firing his pistol at the intruders.

Through the haze of smoke curling up from the dead monster’s burned chest and ragged neck stump, Ethan saw the soldiers vibrating in and out, the bullets passing through their ghosts and ricocheting off the wall behind them. A round from Jackson’s pistol happened to hit one of the Cyphers’ faceplates as the soldier vibrated back into a solid but that too glanced off, leaving only a small scar on the black material. Then Jackson was out of bullets, and in desperation he went for a rifle that one of the other stricken men had dropped.

The soldiers were near enough that Ethan could make out a small red glyph at the lower right of their faceplates, what he reasoned was a mark of honor. The one in the lead wore an additional glyph, a mark of higher honor. As Jackson took aim with his rifle, this Cypher leader stopped in its advance and fired a blast with its energy weapon. The double fireballs streaked out toward Jackson, but just that fast Ethan with a resurgence of will turned them off their deadly course and sent them sizzling through the wall.

Using both hands again, he fired two blasts of his own at the Cypher leader. The effort cost him more pain and a feeling that the organs and bones of this body were nearing meltdown, but double whirling storms of a thousand fiery spheres left him and flew at the alien. The Cypher leader vibrated out at incredible speed. The soldier behind him was not so quick, and it was this creature who was blown into burning pieces by Ethan’s directed energy. The two other soldiers blurred out and in again, appearing at different places and more widely spaced. Ethan sensed an electrical disturbance just to his right and there the Cypher leader vibrated back into a solid, reaching for him to clamp a spidery hand upon his shoulder. The peacekeeper feared that grip, for he thought a charge of power from it could paralyze this body with pain and render it uncontrollable, which he knew was its aim. Before the Cypher could take hold of him, it had to blur out once more because of the bullets that were being fired from both Jackson and the two men with rifles; a couple of the rifle slugs ricocheted off the concrete dangerously close to Ethan and the others who were still fighting off the effects of the monster’s sonic shriek.

One of the other Cyphers vibrated back in fast enough to fire its weapon at the two riflemen, and again Ethan was able to veer the fireballs off their trajectory. A bullet from Jackson’s rifle hit the soldier in the chest and knocked it backward, but it ghosted back out before it fell and did not return. Ethan sent a stream of flaming spheres and bolts of energy at the remaining soldier, who was caught before it could defend itself or dematerialize. It was blown to burning pieces as the other had been.

The Cypher leader reappeared about six feet to Ethan’s left and behind him, almost on top of Bennett Jackson. As Ethan turned and summoned up the power to destroy this creature, the soldier blasted Jackson at point-blank range and the double fireballs blew the man apart. The upper portion of Jackson’s body from head to waist was thrown across the garage by the impact, and just as Ethan let loose another barrage of explosive spheres and energy bolts the Cypher leader vibrated out and the far wall was cratered by the blast, which flung pieces of rock and plumes of dust into the air.

Ethan searched the roiling miasma of dust, the breath harsh in this body’s lungs and his head still full of pain. He scanned the garage, expectant that the Cypher leader might come at him from any direction.

There was no reappearance. The seconds ticked past. Ethan reasoned that the Cyphers orders had been to capture him but not kill or maim him. They had just learned he would not be taken alive. A minute passed. The peacekeeper waited, but the Cypher leader did not vibrate back into solid form. He looked at the grisly remains of Bennett Jackson. The upper portion of the body was on fire, the lower sprawled out only a short distance away. Extreme heat had cauterized both halves of the corpse. That execution had been vengeance for the death of the Cypher leader’s soldiers. Ethan thought it had become a personal battle, if the Cyphers could think in that way. What the Cyphers could not capture they would have to destroy, and Ethan knew they realized that now…he was too powerful to be allowed to live, no matter what weapons they might be able to create from him.

The Cypher leader would be back at any time, and with orders to kill. Ethan was sure of it. But for the moment…his radar was clear.

Except for the ships.

He stood up, shakily, and fell again with his first step. The world seemed to be revolving around him at a dizzying speed. He pulled himself up and walked slowly, as if burdened in a dream, through the destroyed entrance to the White Mansion.

His vision was still clouded with a red mist and his ears still rang. But he could look up at the yellow clouds and see two worlds at war.

They were fighting up there. The Cypher ships had attacked the Gorgon ships. Streaks of incandescent red and blue shot across the heavens. He couldn’t see with these eyes any of the ships nor could he hear any of their battle beyond a low rumble, but he could see them with his mind: the huge triangular mottled shapes of the Gorgons and the even more massive sleek black craft of the Cyphers, now pouring out hundreds of the smaller, single-pilot ships that darted in to either be destroyed by Gorgon energy orbs or, getting past those, to impale themselves upon Gorgon meat and explode with deadly force. The Gorgons were fighting back, though, because as Ethan watched he saw one of the Cypher warcraft, eight hundred feet wide, careen down from the clouds with blue-burning holes along its length and crash into the mountains ten or so miles distant. A red energy beam lanced from the sky and seared the top off another peak, throwing huge chunks of rock into the air.

The peacekeeper stood alone.

How he could stop this, he wasn’t sure. Area 51 might hold the key. He realized he had been compelled to reach this place before the President of the United States could commit suicide, because that man was the only one who could get entrance to the complex.

If there was something in Area 51 that might help him…something of alien creation, that could stop this senseless war and save the planet from destruction…

Someone touched his shoulder.

He turned to face Dave, who was ashen and haggard-looking. Behind him was Olivia, and behind her, Hannah and Nikki.

His friends, on this turbulent and troubled world.

Derryman staggered out. His face and hair were whitened by rock dust, his glasses were crooked and blood leaked from his right ear. He was shaking his head back and forth as if to deny the nightmare his life had become.

Ethan started to speak to Dave, but words failed him. There was nothing he could say; the horror spoke for itself.

They stood on what seemed the edge of the earth, watching the beams of energy weapons streak back and forth, seeing explosions in the clouds, until the sky itself ruptured and rain fell upon the vast landscape of dead trees and broken rock where no human dared walk.

Five.

What Is To Be

Twenty-Nine.

Jefferson Jericho had fled up the stairs and now found himself standing before the automatic rifles of two soldiers who wore immaculate dark blue Marine dress uniforms, white caps and white gloves. They looked for all the world as if they were born to blast him into nothingness. Their fingers were on the triggers and the laser targeting put red dots on Jefferson’s chest near the heart. One of the Marines was using his communicator.

“Axe Two Zero,” said the young man, who was maybe in his early twenties but had the hard, composed face of someone who had both seen and delivered violent death. He was having to speak loudly because the alarm was still ringing. “One of the new arrivals is on Level Four! What’s the story down there?”

No answer was returned.

“Greg? Where are you?”

Jefferson had lifted his hands and put them behind his head on their command. “Something got in,” he told them. His voice was weak and shaky. “That’s what they said. I don’t know what, but something got in.”

“We know there was a breach,” the soldier answered. Then, into the comm device again, “Greg? Come back, man! What’s going on?”

“There was a Gorgon down below,” Jefferson managed to say. “Level Three. Down below.”

“Greg, answer up!”

Jefferson saw another corridor beyond the two soldiers. He had just come out of the stairwell when these men had stepped in front of him with their weapons ready. Another set of stairs continued up along the stairwell to one or more higher levels.

The young soldier pressed another combination on the keypad. “Axe Two Zero,” he repeated. “Frisco, you copy?”

“The Gorgon,” Jefferson said. “He looks like a man. Something else got in, I don’t know what.” He had the feeling of hot blood pounding in his face and cold sweat making the rest of his body shiver, and he thought he was about to pass out, but he feared any movement because he thought these two would shoot him with no hesitation. He wavered on his feet, dark motes spinning before his eyes.

“Frisco, talk to me!”

“Can I get some water?” Jefferson asked. He dared to look behind himself at the stairwell, fearful that even though shot to pieces Vope was coming after him. “Please…I think I—”

“Shut him up,” the Marine told his companion, who stepped forward to spin Jefferson around and slam him against the wall. Then with a rifle barrel between his shoulder blades, Jefferson was frisked though this had already been done when he and the others had entered the garage. “Frisco,” said the Marine into his comm unit, “come back!”

“He’s not gonna answer,” the other Marine said. “Shit’s hit the fan down there.”

“What’s happening?” the voice of another man asked, loudly over the alarm. “Sergeant Akers, tell me!”

“I’m finding out the situation now, sir, but everything’s under control.”

He was a good liar, Jefferson thought. Sergeant Akers was probably scared shitless, but his voice conveyed firm authority. Jefferson turned his head to see who the new man was, though he already knew. He recognized that man’s voice, and there was only one reason this installation was here and guarded by both Secret Service agents and Marines.

The President of the United States stood in the corridor.

“Jason!” Jefferson said to President Beale. The one and only time he had seen this man in person had been many years ago, when Jefferson was known as Leon Kushman and was working in Arkansas as a volunteer for Bill Clinton. Jason Beale had been a young law student in Missouri, four years older than Jefferson, and both the self-confident and rather devil-may-care firebrands had found themselves at a party where they smoked weed and talked about Leon’s penchant for sneaking into porn theaters, which led to a rambling discussion of the attributes of several actresses in that profession.

“It’s me! Leon Kushman! Don’t you remember me?”

Jason Beale wore a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a red-patterned tie with a knot so tight it looked near to strangulation. An American flag pin gleamed at his lapel. He was thin, the suit and the shirt a little too large for his shrunken frame. His mane of blonde hair had gone all gray and was thinning in front, but combed with careful precision and likely sprayed in place. He was still a handsome man, very photogenic, but there were circles as dark as bruises under the wary blue eyes. Deep lines cut across a high and noble forehead. His jaw sagged, and as Jefferson awaited an answer, a tic started at the corner of Beale’s left eye and made that entire side of his face twitch as if he’d taken a blow there, or as if he expected a blow to be delivered and he was already flinching from it.

“Leon Kushman!” Jefferson repeated. “The party at Ginger Wright’s condo, May of 1992!”

The First Lady, who was not Ginger Wright, was standing behind her man. Her name was Amanda, maiden name Gale, daughter of the president of an influential Missouri financial group and herself the founder of a public relations agency that had helped Jason Beale along to the Oval Office from the state senate. She was helping him now, it seemed, by holding onto him as if steadying him from a fall.

“Who is this man?” Beale asked his guards. There was something slow and mushy about his speech. The tic continued, getting stronger. “Why is he here?”

“Sir, please return to your quarters,” Akers said. “We have everything under control.”

“I demand to know. The alarm’s going off. Vance doesn’t answer when I call and neither does Bennett. I demand to know what the situation is.”

“Sir, please—”

“Sergeant, I go on television within the hour to speak to the American people. They deserve to know what the situation is.” He looked up at the ceiling, his face twitching badly on the left side. “That alarm. Can’t you stop it?”

“Yes sir,” Akers replied. Jefferson saw the young Marine glance at the First Lady and give an almost imperceptible nod. “If you’ll allow yourself to be taken back to your quarters, sir, we’ll get that alarm shut off and everything in order.”

“They’ll be coming to do my makeup soon,” Beale said.

“Jason!” Jefferson tried again. “I wrote you! I asked you to autograph a picture!” He realized what name he’d last used on the several requests he’d made for a personally autographed picture to impress potential High Rollers. “Jefferson Jericho! Don’t you remember?”

The President’s mouth opened and then closed again. An opaque film seemed to fall across his eyes.

“Let’s go back home, Mandy,” he told the First Lady, who was herself heavily lined and weary-looking though she’d been very beautiful, a sportswoman as well as a business brain, back in the day. Her long dark brown hair was streaked with gray, and her eyes, sunken down into a face that carried no expression, were the color of ashes. She led her husband away along the corridor toward a set of double doors at the far end.

“Axe Two Zero,” Akers said into his communicator. “God damn that alarm!” he told the other Marine, and then back into the comm device, “Keith, you there? Answer me, man!”

“Danny, copy that!” The voice sounded out of breath, and behind it was the noise of confusion as if people were rushing past the speaker and jostling him. “You secure?”

“Got an intruder up here, one of the new arrivals. He’s babbling about a Gorgon on Level Three. What’s the story?”

“We had a breach.”

“Copy that. What came in?”

“You’ll have to see it to believe it. I can hardly hear you, my ears are fucked up. We’ve got a shitmess down here. Doc’s on his way. We lost Jackson, and we’ve got five others in pretty bad shape.”

“Lost Jackson? How?”

“I can’t talk, Danny. My head’s killin’ me.”

“Copy that, but what am I supposed to do with this sonofabitch up here?”

“Hold him. We’re gonna do a sweep on all levels, we’ll get somebody there as soon as we can. Out.”

“There’s a dead man on Level Three,” Jefferson said. “One of the agents. The Gorgon killed him.”

“You sit down,” Akers told him. “Do everything real slowly. Put your back against that wall. Keep your hands behind your head. Cross your legs in front of you and sit still.”

“I know the President. I knew him when he was a law student. What did he mean about going on tele—”

“Shut your hole and sit down.” The second Marine put his rifle’s barrel right in Jefferson’s face and the little red laser dot glowed on his forehead.

Jefferson sat down. There would be time later to try to contact Jason Beale, if the President could remember who he was, but for now the preacherman decided to ask no further questions. He wanted to stay alive, and if two Marines with rifles were standing guard over him, it suited him just fine to stay exactly where he was.

H

“Damn,” said Vance Derryman as he took stock of the decimated garage level. How the hell were they going to get that carcass out of here? And how would the entrance be repaired? Bennett was dead, some of the others had been carried to the infirmary, the level was wrecked, and up in the sky the Gorgon and Cypher ships were still fighting though the boy—check that, the alien who looked like a boy—had told him their battle was moving away from the White Mansion. His head was pounding and his nerves were shot, everything was muffled, and he thought his insides had been hurt because he’d thrown up blood a few minutes ago. That alarm…piercing even through the damage to his hearing. “Somebody cut the alarm!” he shouted. His voice sounded like the murmur of someone speaking underwater. “Jesus, stop that noise!” He couldn’t think, he couldn’t reason any of this out. Reasoning had been his strong suit before the aliens had brought their war to this world. Everything was cut-and-dried, everything had a rational explanation. When he was briefed about Area 51, he had closed his mind to it. That was someone else’s responsibility; he could listen to the briefing and hear about extraterrestrials and ships from other planets and artifacts that were being researched at S-4 for the military, but he could be masking all that with mentally replaying a golf game at Hidden Creek or thoughts on why Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony had been so savagely panned by the critics in 1897. On the third day of April two years ago, the steadiness of his life had been destroyed. He’d asked his younger brother to get Linda to a shelter, because he had a duty to the President, and he had no time. He’d gotten a cell call that they’d made it and were with the National Guard in a warehouse complex outside Reston, but then the satellites had come down and the towers went out and that was the end of all communication.

General Winslett staggered up to him and said something. Derryman only caught bits and pieces of it that made no sense. Winslett’s face was florid and sweating. His eyes looked like they were swimming in blood. The general stood staring at the headless monstrosity that lay across the floor, and very suddenly he turned away and made a couple of steps before he threw up. One of the soldiers came to help him, and Foggy let himself be guided to the infirmary.

They were going to have to chop that thing up, he decided. Have to chop it into a thousand pieces and haul it out of here piece by piece.

Dave McKane was at his side. He spoke, but Derryman shook his head.

Dave tried again, leaning in and speaking louder: “Can we talk?”

Derryman pointed to an ear. “I can hardly hear a damned thing!” The alarm had ceased, though; its shriek had stopped driving a spike into his brain. There were too many there already. “Give me some time!”

Dave nodded and moved away. He went carefully across the chunks of rubble and then outside, where the air did not smell of smoke or burned reptilian flesh but instead of bitter ozone. Ethan and Olivia were standing together at the guardrail, watching the distant flashes of blue and red bursts up in the clouds. Hannah and Nikki had both been taken to the infirmary not long ago. Both had been holding themselves together pretty well considering, but it was the huge carcass in the garage and the man’s grisly remains that finally did them in. Nikki had collapsed soon after she’d seen the carnage and might have hurt herself in the fall if Ethan hadn’t caught her, and after realizing what the monster had been Hannah said she thought she needed a little something to steady her nerves. Then the tough old bird sat down on the mountain’s edge and began to sob, and Olivia had gone to find someone to help. As she was being led away, Hannah had given them a crooked smile from the wrinkled, tear-damp face, and said if she could get half a bottle of whiskey she would be as right as rain, which sounded good until you thought about what was in the rain these days.

“Has Jefferson turned up?” Olivia asked when Dave reached them.

“I’m sure he will. Bad pennies always do.” Dave watched the flashes of light. In the far distance, pieces of something rippling with blue flame fell into the forest, and almost at once, smoke began to curl up from amid the dead trees. “Are they getting any closer?”

“Still moving away,” Ethan said. His head pounded, the nerves of this body were still on fire and his hearing impaired, but he was able to ‘hear’ with his mind much more clearly than with his damaged audio receptors. “I believe they’re too occupied with each other to think about me. For the moment,” he added. His voice was muffled, alien even to himself. He thought also he should tell them what else he believed to be true. “They know now that they can’t take me alive. The next time they come, it will be to destroy me.”

Ethan let that sit for a few seconds and then he turned to face Dave. “That’s why I have to get to this Area 51 as soon as possible.” He’d already explained to both Dave and Olivia that he suspected—but was not sure—there might be something at the S-4 installation he could use. What that might be, he didn’t know, but human weapons would not stop this war. In fact, Ethan doubted that any weapon could stop the war, short of a device that would blow up the world…but then again, it was the line in space that the Cyphers and Gorgons fought over, so even if this planet was blown to pieces the contested border would still remain.

“I don’t know how you think you can stop this,” Dave said, as astutely as if he’d learned how to read Ethan’s mind. “To do that you’d have to destroy both of them, wouldn’t you? I mean…both their civilizations. Or even their worlds. How are you going to do that? Wouldn’t that be…like…against your purpose or something?”

“Yes,” the peacekeeper said. “My purpose is not to destroy worlds, but to save them.”

“So…if you’re looking for an alien weapon…how is that going to help you stop the war?”

Ethan shook his head. “What I believe…is that I was brought here for a purpose by the greater power. The only further purpose I can see is persuading your President to get me into the S-4 installation.” He was silent for a moment, watching the fires of battle in the sky and calculating that their conflict was moving them further and further away from the White Mansion. “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me,” he said. “Something of value I can use must be there. Only the President can get me in, and as I told you, he’s both mentally impaired and suicidal.”

“I think it’s hopeless,” Olivia said.

“Don’t talk like that.” Dave saw how dark her eyes were, how they were sunken in pools of darkness, how her expression was blank with shock and grief and how close she was to falling over the edge of her own cliff. He put his arm around her shoulders, because it occurred to him that one step and she would be gone. “We can’t give up,” he said. “We have to trust Ethan.”

“Trust Ethan,” she repeated tonelessly. “There must be many millions of Gray Men out there. Around the world,” she said. “China…Russia…South America…everywhere. Maybe a billion or more. Even if Ethan can stop this…what about the Gray Men? And millions more who’ve been driven to madness, or have had to live like animals these last two years. What about them, Dave? How can even Ethan fix that? Things can never go back to what they were, before.” She stared at the guardrail, and Dave imagined she was thinking that crossing it and throwing herself from this height would at least take her away from the misery. “We’ve lost too much,” she said. “Way too much.”

Dave looked to Ethan for help, but the peacekeeper was silent. It was left up to him to bring Olivia back from the precipice.

“Yeah, we’ve lost too much,” he said. “Me, my wife, and sons. You, your husband, and the life you knew. Look at me, Olivia. Will you do that?”

She did, and Dave thought that Olivia’s eyes were nearly dead, her spirit too.

“We haven’t lost each other,” he said. “We’ve got to hang on. If Ethan believes he needs to get to Area 51, then I believe it too. Olivia, we’ve come too far to let go now.” He nodded toward the flare of energy weapons in the clouds beyond. “They win everything if we let go. Please…stay with me…with us…just a little longer.”

“Tell me,” she said, still listlessly, “how we would get to that place? The cars here are wrecked. Our bus is…” She hesitated, trying to think how to phrase it. “No longer useable,” she said. “I don’t know the exact distance, but I’d say that Roswell, New Mexico is a long way from here. So how would we get there, Dave? Ethan? Any ideas?”

“Not just yet. We need to speak to Mr. Derryman.”

They were interrupted by the presence of Jefferson Jericho, who bashed his shin against a piece of broken stone and let loose a curse as he came through the opening. He was pallid and his eyes looked dazed; he was walking like he’d gotten into the bottle of whiskey Hannah craved. “What is that thing in there?” he asked, and then: “The bus…where’s the bus?”

“That thing was the bus,” Dave told him as he reached them. “The Gorgons have a weapon that creates life from—”

“I don’t want to know that,” Jefferson interrupted. “Christ, what a mess!” He focused on Ethan. “Did you kill it?”

“Yes.”

“Vope,” Jefferson said to Dave. “What happened to him?”

“He—it—vanished, or transported away or whatever they do. Where have you been?”

Jefferson heard distant thunder and was suddenly aware of the battle that raged in the sky many miles away. For a moment his attention was taken by the flashes of light. “I was up on Level Four,” he explained. “President Beale and the First Lady are up there. A couple of Marines played a little rough with me, but they got the order to let me go.” He frowned. “Everybody okay? Hannah and Nikki? Are they all right?”

“Both in the infirmary, which I think is on this level but back in the mountain somewhere. They’re okay physically, but their nerves are shot.”

“Yeah, mine too.” Jefferson took a long look at Olivia and saw that she was just hanging on. “How about you?” he asked her.

“I have been better. Ethan’s been talking about getting to Area 51 to find…I don’t know what…something he might be able to use to stop that.” She motioned toward the flares and flashes in the yellow clouds. “I don’t see how it can be stopped, no matter what he can find.”

“Area 51,” Jefferson said to Ethan. “Where the flying saucers are.” Three years ago he would’ve given a good belly laugh and maybe a middle finger to the crackpots who talked about government conspiracies and the dissection of bulbous-headed spacemen in underground labs.

“I want to get into the research facility and see what artifacts are there. Mr. Derryman has told me that the only person who can get me in is your President, but he’s—”

“Pretty much out of his mind, yeah. I met him once, a long time ago, when he was a law student working for Clinton. We smoked weed at a party in Little Rock. I guess we could’ve blackmailed each other.” Jefferson had actually considered that at one point, but he figured an army of lawyers would grind him to powder and investigations into his own past could derail everything he’d built. So, to hell with the autographed picture. His blurry gaze returned to Dave. “They’ve got a weapon that turned our bus into that thing?”

“Inanimate objects into living tissue,” Ethan said. “Highly advanced and rapid creation of cells using the object as a framework. In easier terms, a life beam.”

“Holy shit!” said Jefferson. “And I thought 3D printing was way out there!”

“The President,” Ethan said, getting them back on track. “You’ve seen him.”

“I have. He didn’t recognize me, but then again I look one hell of a lot different than I used to. I’m not sure in his present condition Beale would recognize his own mother.”

“At least you have a connection to him. If we can remind him of that, so much the better.”

“But you have to get through Derryman first,” Dave said.

“Yes.” Ethan stood silently for awhile, watching the battle drift further from the White Mansion, which was a good thing. There was a tremendous blue flash in the clouds, blue streaks seeming to shoot in all directions, and far away a huge black shape came slowly spinning down through the clouds and crashed somewhere beyond the mountain peaks. Score one for the Gorgons, he thought, but the Cyphers would have their revenge. That was another reason their war was never-ending; revenge begat revenge, and so it would be into eternity.

It wasn’t long before one of the soldiers and a Secret Service agent emerged from the White Mansion Mountain and, at the point of automatic rifles, herded the group back inside. Men were in there trying to clean the place up, but it was going to be a Herculean task. What they were going to do about the destroyed entranceway was anyone’s guess. The nearness of the beast’s carcass made Olivia stagger and clutch at Dave for support.

“Can you get her to the infirmary?” he asked the soldier. “She’s in shock, she needs some medical attention.”

“Do it,” said the agent, who was one of the jeans-clad, less formal men who’d brought them in from the bus. He understood shock. He’d been assigned to stand watch over the teenaged girl with the eyepatch, and he’d stayed right where he was supposed to be until he heard shooting in the corridor, and then he’d been shocked into immobility for a precious few seconds by the sight of a man-shaped thing with snakelike arms. He’d been one of the men who had gotten on his belly on the concrete and opened fire at the Cypher soldiers. After he’d thrown up blood and his ears and nose had stopped bleeding, he’d gotten some Valium from the infirmary. There had been a run on Valium. He was more in control of himself now, but his hearing was still muffled and there was a pain in his left ear that shot through that side of his face and down into his neck.

“We need to see Mr. Derryman,” Ethan told him when the soldier had helped Olivia away.

“My orders are to escort you back to your rooms.”

“It is urgent,” Ethan said. “The Gorgons and the Cyphers are going to come again. The next time you won’t be able to survive.”

The agent could not look into Ethan’s silver eyes. He stared at the dead, headless carcass for a long moment. Then he took his comm device from his pocket and keyed in some numbers. “Tempest One One,” he said into it. “Sergeant Akers, is Derryman up there?”

“Affirm that. He’s getting the boss ready. You okay?”

“I’m here. Listen…I’m bringing three of the new arrivals up. It’s on my head. The spooky one wants to speak to Derryman.”

“Ambler’s in bad shape, Johnny. He needs the doc to take a look at him, but he’s wanting to get the speech done.”

“We’re all in bad shape. The spook says it’s urgent and I believe him. If you’d seen what happened down here you’d believe it too. I’m bringing them up. Out.” He put his communicator away. “Let’s go, but understand this: I am empowered to kill any and all of you if I don’t like a single movement you make.” It sounded like a hollow threat delivered from the agency’s manual, because it was clear the spook had saved the installation from unrecoverable destruction. “Walk ahead of me, single file,” he said.

Thirty.

“They’re about to start rolling,” Sergeant Akers said to the Secret Service agent when they had reached Level Four. “Ambler won’t like the interruption.” He’d seen the alien’s silver eyes and felt a shiver of not fear—he was far beyond fear—but wonder and anticipation. He was about to ask Can’t it wait, but he knew it could not.

“My responsibility,” Tempest One One said, and he motioned Dave, Ethan and Jefferson on along the corridor. Jefferson couldn’t help but give both the Marine guards a little flippant salute as he passed them.

The group reached a door marked studio and the agent told Dave to go in. Dave opened the door to a brightly lit room with softly colored green walls, a vanilla-colored sofa, a coffee table, and various overstuffed chairs. Through small speakers in the ceiling played music that Dave equated to a Main Street parade, but Jefferson correctly identified the piece as a John Phillips Souza march, all American with bursting pride and shiny buttons. He had used such music to stir patriotism and open wallets at Fourth of July celebrations in New Eden. Three rooms went off from this central chamber, all with closed doors. The Secret Service agent went to the furthermost door on the left and knocked at it. Almost at once it was opened and there stood a sharp-chinned man in a dark blue suit, white shirt, gray-striped necktie, and an American flag pin on his lapel. Ethan had seen this man on the garage level as he’d been brought in, but had not seen him since.

“They want to speak to Derryman,” the agent said, moving aside so this new man could see them. “Urgent, they say.”

The sharp-chinned man gave Ethan a hard, cold stare before he spoke. There were equal measures of repugnance and fear in it. “You know he’s busy. Beale’s just out of makeup, they’re going to be rolling in about three minutes.”

“Yeah, I know that. Just tell him they’re here. Tell him the alien says the Gorgons and Cyphers are going to attack again.”

“Hell of a time.”

“Screw the protocol,” said Tempest One One, reaching a ragged edge. “Everything’s gone out the fucking window. Tell Derryman.”

The other man withdrew into the room and closed the door without another word.

“Just wait,” the agent told his charges, as the John Phillips Souza tune marched along with bass drumbeats and cymbals and shiny notes from long-dead trombones.

Nearly a minute passed. When the door opened again, Vance Derryman’s face was strained with tension and pain that Ethan could feel like a blade drawn along his own spine. Behind the glasses, Derryman’s eyes were red and swollen. He had changed into a black suit because the gray one he’d worn previously had been marred by rock dust.

“I said I needed time,” he told Dave. His voice was slow and deliberate and a little too loud because his hearing was still impaired.

“We don’t have that luxury,” Ethan said. “I want to know…how did you get here?” He saw his answer in Derryman’s mind in a matter of seconds. “Where’s the helicopter?”

Derryman had thought the entire trip through—Air Force One from Washington to Salt Lake City, from the airport by black SUV to the secure hangar and helipad, then the flight here. He knew of course the alien would’ve picked it from his mind as quickly as he saw the mental images. Ethan surely already knew where the VH-71 Kestrel was kept, but Derryman spoke for the benefit of the others. “We have a helipad on the other side of the mountain. It’s camouflaged. The ’copter’s in a hangar there.”

“That can get us to the S-4 area,” Ethan said, a statement of fact.

“In about three hours. But I told you already…” Derryman paused. His jaw worked. The pain and pressure in his head were still killing him, fouling up his thought processes. “You want to see one reason he can’t leave this place? Come in and follow me.”

Derryman took Dave, Ethan and Jefferson through another seating area to a door with a red light above it and a sign that read on air, but it was not illuminated. He opened the door and ushered them into a dimly lit space where there were a couple of rows of theater seats. Three men wearing headphones sat at a large mixing console and control panel that sparkled with small green lights. Beyond a large glass window, the President of the United States stood behind a podium that bore the Presidential seal. A bank of spotlights was aimed at him, along with a pair of professional-looking television cameras. The two camera technicians also wore headphones. Up on a ladder, another man was adjusting the spotlight beams. A gray-haired woman wearing jeans and a blue paisley blouse was dabbing powder on Jason Beale’s damp forehead. Behind the President and the podium was a set of library shelves that held not only a few dozen hardcover books but items like a small bust of Abraham Lincoln, a set of praying hands cast in bronze with a Bible leaning against them, framed color photographs of Beale and the First Lady along with their two college-aged children James and Natalie, a world globe, and other items as might be found in the White House. Everything was displayed on shelves high enough so the cameras could catch them.

“What is this?” Dave asked. “How is—”

“Sit down,” Derryman said. “He’ll be giving his speech in about a minute.” He pointed at a digital clock counting off the seconds just above the window.

One of the men at the control console pressed a button. “Kathy, he’s still got some shine on his nose.” He sounded tired and lackluster, as if he’d gone through this a hundred times but it was his job and he was performing it to the best of his ability. The woman nodded and applied the powder brush.

Derryman sat down in the first row beside Dave, with Ethan between Dave and Jefferson. At the end of the row sat the First Lady, who spared them not a glance. She was drinking from a glass with liquid and icecubes in it. Dave smelled alcohol.

“Am I all right?” Beale asked, looking upward at what must’ve been a speaker mounted on the wall on his side of the glass.

“You’re fine, sir,” said the console controller.

“Mandy? Am I all right?” Beale’s voice was thin and fragile, a far cry from what both Jefferson and Dave remembered of previous speeches, though Dave hadn’t heard many of them, and he was not fond of politics. Before the aliens had come, his opinion was that politicians disdained the public until they needed votes.

“Yes, you’re all right,” the First Lady said, but she wasn’t looking at him and she was taking another drink.

“My most trustworthy critic,” Beale announced, with a nervous laugh, to anyone who was listening. He was wearing the same dark blue suit, white shirt and red-patterned tie Jefferson had seen him in previously. He was immaculate in his clothing and his makeup was expertly applied. The dark circles under Beale’s eyes and the deep lines in his face could be hidden, but no makeup could hide the feeling of sad and tragic desperation that Ethan knew everyone in the room could sense.

“Sir,” said the console controller, “any glare on the teleprompter?” The way the man spoke this, it sounded like a rote question.

“No glare. It’s good.”

“We’ll give you a countdown to showtime, as usual. Kathy, finish him up. George, you’re done. The lights look fine.” The makeup lady instantly stopped her work and the technician came down the ladder and folded it up to prop it against the stage set’s far wall.

Jefferson leaned forward. “What’s going on here?” he asked Derryman.

“The President’s address to the nation. He does this twice a month.”

“To the nation? What nation?”

“The one he believes is still out there.”

“He doesn’t know the truth? He thinks people have power and cable TV?”

“Gentlemen, I’m going to press the Talk button,” said the man at the controls, as a warning that they should be careful of what they were saying.

“Go ahead,” Derryman told him. “We’re just here to watch.”

“Ready on Camera One. Ready on Camera Two. Mr. President, let’s start at five…four…three…two…one…and you’re on the air.”

Jason Beale stood straight and tall in the convergence of the spotlights. He did not smile at the cameras, nor was his expression forlorn. He was a politician, and he had manufactured upon his thin and sallow face an expression of the deepest, most sincere resolve.

“My fellow Americans,” he read from the teleprompter, “my cherished citizens of this noble country that will never be broken by any invader earthly or otherwise, I bring you news of hope today. According to the latest military reports, your United States Army and your United States Air Force have destroyed in battle a stronghold of what we know as the Cyphers west of the Mississippi River near Alexandria, Louisiana. Your United States Navy and Marines are currently in action against a Gorgon stronghold near Seattle, Washington, and I am told by my Chief of Staff that the Gorgons are on the retreat.” President Beale paused. The tic began at his left eye, making that side of his face wince. He kept his head lowered. “Pardon me,” he said thickly into his microphone. “I am overwhelmed with emotion…as I’m sure we all are…all of us, in these hard days of trial and tribulation.” This was not being read from the teleprompter, but was coming from the torment of his soul. He didn’t speak for maybe ten or fifteen more seconds, during which the filming continued. When Beale at last lifted his face toward the lens the tic was still there but it had lessened, displaying perhaps a remnant of the man’s strength of will. He began to read again from the teleprompter. “I am happy—gratified—to say that the following cities are near liberation from this unprecedented threat, though not without heavy loss of American heroes: Charlotte, North Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; Providence, Rhode Island; Chicago, Illinois; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Omaha, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; and Portland, Oregon. Be advised to stay in your shelters in those cities until the All Clear signal is given, that signal to be determined at a later date. On a darker note, I am informed by my chief of staff that there is still no word from the other capitals and leaders of the world, but we will continue to monitor all satellites and send forth messages of support and the blessings of God twenty-four hours a day.”

Derryman shifted in his seat. Ethan understood that of course this was all a fiction designed to give the President hope and to prevent him from finding a way to kill himself. What leader of any nation could bear to see their country—their responsibility—torn away, broken and conquered on their watch?

“We are still here,” Beale went on, in his forceful and Presidential voice though the tic on the left side of his face betrayed all. “We are still the United States of America. I am receiving updates every few hours from my commanders in the field. As I told you last time we spoke, we have lost many good men and women, but just as many remain in the service of this country. We extend our heartfelt wishes for success to the other nations of this world, and we hope they are receiving this broadcast. Let me repeat as I have said many times: remain in your shelters until you are given the All Clear signal. The armed forces are fighting for you and I believe they will conquer both these threats to our way of life. I want to say to my children James and Natalie, stay in your safe area and hold onto the faith that very soon we will all see the dawning of a new day. I will say that to all the children of the world and to all the families who have bound together to withstand this assault. I will say to every soldier in the field and every sailor at sea, God be with you when you go into harm’s way, and never forget that you are the pride of this nation, you are the best of the best, and we know you will not give up the fight no matter what. We too, here at this safe location, will never give up the fight.” He paused for a moment, to let those stirring words resonate, and the new arrivals in the audience wondered how much of that he really believed.

The ice cubes made a hollow sound in the First Lady’s glass as she took another drink.

“I will report back in two weeks, same day and same time,” said the man at the podium, whose forehead had begun to show the sparkles of sweat again though cool air was blowing quietly from the vents. “This is the President of your United States, Jason Beale, signing off as always: be brave.”

Then Beale stood motionless except for the tic in his face until the console controller said, “And out. That’s it, sir.”

“Did I do all right? Mandy, how did I look?”

“Tell him,” she said between swallows, “that he looked very handsome.” Her voice was just a shade slurred.

“She says you looked great, sir.”

“I was worried. It’s hot in here. Is it hot to you?”

“It’s the lights. It’s always the lights, sir.”

Dave had turned his head toward Vance Derryman and leaned closer to the man’s ear. “How do you get away with this? I can tell you that for damned sure Denver hasn’t been fucking liberated!”

“Indeed,” Derryman said.

“Yeah, indeed! He thinks the satellites are still up there? And people have electricity?”

“Watch your voice, he’s coming out.” Derryman stood up. “Excellent, Jason. That told them what they needed to know.”

Beale took stock of Dave, Ethan and Jefferson, who also had risen to their feet. When he looked into Ethan’s silver eyes he rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. The tic was more severe now. “Is he safe?”

“I believe he is.”

“Vance told me about the video. How you broke open the gates without any weapon,” Beale said. “What are you and where did you come from?”

“I’m neither Gorgon nor Cypher, if that eases your mind. We came from Denver. Where I am from is hard to explain, but I am here on a mission to stop their war.”

“We’re winning,” the President said. “It may take awhile…it may cause the loss of many thousands…hundreds of thousands…but we’re winning. Aren’t we, Vance?”

“The field commanders are optimistic,” Derryman replied.

“Look…sir,” Dave began. “I think you—”

“That’s good to hear,” Ethan interrupted, not wanting the plain hard truth that Dave was about to present to the President to unhinge the man’s mind any further. A quick glance into that mind showed a tangle of emotions and self-recriminations, guilts, frustrations, and fears that flew like dark birds through a haunted forest. The sadness and sense of loss there was nearly crushing. Ethan withdrew, realizing that Jason Beale really did believe the lies he had read from the teleprompter to what he thought was his American people.

“We have the power grid back up in some areas,” Beale said. “The northeast and the west coast. I know not very many people can see and hear my encouragement to hang on…not right now…but I think it helps. Don’t you, Vance?”

“I do, sir.”

Beale couldn’t stop staring at Ethan. “You…look like a human boy, except for…those. You say…you’ve come to stop the war? How? And…who sent you here?”

“My commander-in-chief,” Ethan answered. “Consider me a peacekeeper, like your United Nations soldiers. I need to ask you one question, sir. Will you help me get into the S-4 research facility at Area 51?”

Beale immediately looked to Derryman. “What’s he talking about, Vance? Why does he want to get into there?”

“He has some idea that he can find a weapon of use among the artifacts. I’ve told him we have no intention of leaving this installation. It’s too much of a risk for you, sir.”

“That may be,” said Ethan, “but if we can use the helicopter…I think it’s a risk worth taking.”

“Flying through that sky?” Derryman cast a cold eye in his direction. “You don’t know what it was like in Air Force One from Washington to Salt Lake. Now it would be even worse. That’s a no-go, as far as I’m concerned.”

Dave said, “Mr. President, you need to listen to Ethan. Give him the chance to do what he needs to do.”

“Ethan,” Beale repeated. “That’s a quaint name for a creature not of this world.”

“Sir,” Ethan continued, “I ask you to believe in me. I want to stop this war, and the only way I can do that is with help. Your help, sir. I need to get into—”

“This conversation is done,” said Derryman. “We’re not letting the President leave here. Period, end of story.”

“It’s not the end of it. The Cyphers and Gorgons are going to attack this mountain again, once they’ve finished their own fighting. The next time they’re going to destroy everything.”

“Believe what he says, Jason,” said Jefferson Jericho. “Listen…don’t you remember me? Little Rock, the fund-raising dinner for Bill Clinton in May of 1992. Ginger Wright’s party. I was going by the name of Leon Kushman then. Remember?”

Beale blinked slowly. He seemed to be trying to focus on Jefferson but was having trouble. “I don’t…I don’t think I know you. Kushman?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve met…so many people. So many names and faces. They run together. Excuse me…I have a headache,” he said to the group. “Mandy? Mandy?” He was calling to the First Lady as if she was no longer in her seat, yet she was no more than ten feet away at the end of the row. She finished off her drink and got up, with an air about her of weariness and despondency. Ethan thought that she had simply ceased to care, because in a matter of seconds he gathered the information that she believed both their children to be dead. The alcohol dulled a world of pain.

“I’m here,” she said. “Never far away.” She spoke it like a person in prison chains. She regarded Ethan as one might examine a strange form of vegetation growing from a crack in the sidewalk. Ethan knew she was about to ask What the hell are you supposed to be but even that seemed to be too much of an effort for her. She let the caustic question die.

“You did a very good job, sir,” Derryman told him. He clasped the President’s thin shoulder. Jason Beale was a shadow of himself. The President had to be reminded and encouraged to eat even one meal a day. “You always do a good job,” Derryman said. “Go rest now. Listen to some music. Amanda, please remind him to take his meds at five o’clock.” Ethan picked up the thought from Derryman that Beale was on a number of medications, including an antidepressant, and that the First Lady’s medicine was found in a bottle of whiskey. The supply of that was almost gone; she’d been going through it faster and faster. Of the original two cases there were only three bottles left. Derryman was worried about what was going to happen to the First Lady’s mental health when she could no longer self-medicate.

She took her husband’s arm and started to lead him out of the studio, her own balance precarious. Beale turned back toward his chief of staff. “Vance,” he said, with a quick darting look at the alien peacekeeper, “we’re safe, aren’t we? I mean…what he said…about the Gorgons and the Cyphers attacking. We’re safe, aren’t we?”

“I told you, sir, that the breach was taken care of. We did have some intruders, as I explained, but they were turned away.” Derryman gave extra emphasis to that word. “There is no safer place for you and the First Lady to be.”

“Thank you.” Beale’s tormented eyes in the wrecked face found Ethan again. Like a frightened child he asked, “You won’t hurt us, will you?”

“No sir. I want to help, not hurt.”

“I guess…we can’t lock you up, can we? What you did to the gates…no use locking you up.”

“That’s correct.”

Beale could add nothing more to that; his mind was already nearly overwhelmed. He nodded at his wife and together they approached the door. It was unclear who was holding who up, and which was in the better shape of the two.

“Leon Kushman!” Jefferson said before they could get out. “Now my name is Jefferson Jericho! I was an evangelist, on television! Remember me?”

The President suddenly stopped just short of the door. He glanced back. “Oh…yes…that man. I do know that name from somewhere.”

“It’s me! I’m him!”

“Go rest, sir,” Derryman said. “There’ll be time to talk later.” After the President and the First Lady had gone and the door had closed behind them, Derryman let go a long sigh. He rubbed the side of his head that was still in pain. “It has been very, very difficult,” he said.

“It’s not going to get any easier,” Dave answered. “Do you really film him, or is it just for show?”

“He likes us to burn a DVD of the telecast so he can watch it back and critique himself. This has been going on since we got here, every two weeks. I put together the reports. He thinks there’s still some organization to the armed forces, and they’re out there fighting. If he didn’t have that belief…he’d be long gone by now.”

“When they come again,” Ethan said forcefully, “they will destroy this mountain and everyone in it. I’ll try my best to protect you, but I am not infallible. I regret the death of Mr. Jackson, that I couldn’t save him. When are you going to tell the President about that?” Derryman did not reply, but the peacekeeper had his full attention. “Both the Cyphers and the Gorgons want me, because they know I’m something different that they don’t understand,” Ethan said. “If they can’t capture me—which they can’t—they’ll have to make sure I am contained…another word for dead. This body can be destroyed, but not the essence of what I am.” Ethan answered Derryman’s next question before he could ask it. “No, I can’t just leap from body to body…I need time to integrate myself into the form. And time is what we don’t have, sir. It is important—essential—that I get into the S-4 installation. Looking for what, I don’t know, but there must be something I can use.”

“I’ve told you, the President can’t—”

“Your world is going to die,” Ethan said. “All of you—your entire civilization—will die. I can understand that you don’t want to put him at risk, but there is no other way.”

“Listen to him,” Jefferson urged, almost pleading. “Please…listen.”

“No,” Derryman said firmly. “You listen. I have worked for Jason Beale for the greater part of fifteen years. I’ve seen the ups and downs, I’ve seen everything. He is barely hanging on, and so is she. They both know their children are probably dead. I am not going to send him out there in a helicopter flying to New Mexico with those things in the sky. If they’re so bent on destroying you, they’ll shoot that ’copter down in a matter of seconds. No. Now…I’ll take you to the cafeteria, you can get some food. Do you eat?” he asked Ethan.

“The body requires it.”

“If my high school biology teacher could see this!” Derryman said. His face contorted for a few seconds, and Dave thought he was close to jumping his tracks too. “I hope she died in her sleep before all this started!”

“Is this how your world ends?” Ethan asked.

“What?”

“Does your world end not with a bang, but with a whimper?”

Derryman didn’t reply for awhile. He stared at the floor. Then he adjusted his glasses and said, “The cafeteria. I’m going. I suggest you come along, because the guards won’t let you stay up here without me.” He went to the door, opened it, and waited until they obeyed him like good little mindless soldiers.

Thirty-One.

The peacekeeper had discovered something he thought he might miss, when all was said and done. It was called ‘coffee’. As soon as he tasted his first sip, he decided this was quite a drink. It was hot and black, a little bitter, and it made him feel energized, if that was the right term. He imagined he could feel the power of this liquid thrumming through the veins of his appropriated body, and sitting at a table in the cafeteria with Dave, Jefferson, and Olivia, he thought he needed the jolt.

Olivia had joined them after a short stay in the infirmary. The doctor, a no-nonsense military man with close-cropped hair like grains of dark sand covering his scalp, had appraised her, taken her blood pressure, checked her heart and lungs, asked her to follow a moving light by keeping her head motionless, and in the end had given her a Valium and told her she could rest in one of the rooms. He had promptly gone off to give care to his many other patients who’d either been brought in or who had staggered in after the attack. Olivia had taken to a bed for about thirty minutes but had decided she was feeling calmer thanks to the Valium, and she was ready to leave. Before she’d left she had checked on both Nikki and Hannah, who also occupied beds in rooms there. Nikki was coming around, feeling better though she wanted to stay right where she was. Hannah was sleeping, looking now in repose like a very old, thin, and tired woman, and Olivia had asked one of the nurses for a notecard and written on it Hannah, I’ll check on you later. Rest while you can and don’t worry about anything. Have faith. Love you, Olivia.

The cafeteria was brightly lit and bore on its pale blue-painted walls framed photographs of American scenes: Times Square aglow with neon and crowded with people, the Golden Gate catching rays of sunlight that pierced through San Francisco fog, giant redwoods and vivid green moss-covered earth in the John Muir Woods, Boston Harbor on the day of a parade of various red-white-and-blue-decorated boats, a Kansas wheatfield that stretched as far as one could see under the blazing blue sky of summer, massive oaks lining the gravel roadway that led to a restored plantation house somewhere in the South, and other pictures of what used to be. Ethan regarded them in silence and wondered how those could possibly help the morale of the officials and soldiers who had been forced to take refuge here. This was the last stop, he thought. The last station of the line, the place to hunker down after some terrible war or disaster had claimed not only this country, but the entire earth.

There were a couple of dozen other people in the cafeteria, soldiers and civilians alike. They kept their distance from the new arrivals. The food today was chicken noodle soup in a small plastic cup, one yeast roll, and a little orange juice in a second plastic cup. There was a bin for the recycling of the cups. Dave got up for a second helping and was told by a surly cook that he couldn’t have any more, so that was that.

However, there was plenty of coffee. Dave had a plastic cup of it and wondered if there were drugs in it. He couldn’t figure how anybody here could get through a day, much less a week, or a month, without some kind of either stimulant or antidepressant. Without windows, the place felt like a prison; the men and the women here moved slowly and deliberately, and their expressions were mostly blank. They had all lost family members, friends, homes, and the security of their own lives. They had received their death sentence, and they were waiting for the execution.

How much longer they thought they could hold out here, he didn’t know. The alien attack must’ve driven home the futility of this place. It was going to take one hell of a lot of effort to get that garage cleaned up, and he doubted the entranceway could be sealed again. Maybe that was how they got along from day to day, Dave thought. They just concentrated on the task right in front of them and did it, eight-hour shift after eight-hour shift.

The group ate in silence. Ethan heard their thoughts but gave no comment, not wanting to intrude. Olivia was still wan-looking and sometimes sat staring at nothing, her mind freighted with the death of John Douglas and the reality of their seemingly hopeless situation. She was fooling herself that she was doing better; she was really ready to crawl into a corner and pull the walls around her as protection. Ethan saw that two pictures played over and over in her brain: the young Secret Service agent lying in the corridor with his skull horribly crushed, and the headless monster in the garage with smoke rising from its burning chest.

She was nearly at the bitter end of her rope. Ethan didn’t know what he could say to her that would give her some comfort. In fact there was nothing he could say, so he remained silent.

“Look who’s coming to visit,” said Jefferson.

Vance Derryman was approaching. He stopped at another table to talk briefly with a man in a gray-striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up. During the conversation, Derryman motioned toward the table of new arrivals, and the man nodded and looked at them, his face gaunt and hard and revealing absolutely nothing. Then Derryman continued on his path, and when he reached them he took a white handkerchief from within his suit jacket and polished the lenses of his glasses.

“He wants to see us,” said Ethan.

“That’s right.”

“What does he want to see us about?” Dave asked.

“Not all of us,” Ethan explained. “Only Jefferson and me.”

“Right again.” Derryman put his glasses back on. “Of course I’ll be with you.”

“Don’t mind us,” said Dave, with a shrug. “We’ll just stay here with the peons.” The cafeteria was on Level Two but further back in the mountain from the garage. Ethan and Jefferson followed Derryman out to a second stairwell. On Level Four, they were entering the President’s living area from another direction. The Marine Sergeant Akers was waiting there with his automatic rifle to escort them.

They went along the corridor a short distance to the double doors that Jefferson had seen previously. “Thank you, Sergeant,” Derryman said, as dismissal to the Marine. Then Derryman pressed the white button of a doorbell on the wall, and a simple, single chime sounded from within.

“I was expecting ‘Hail To The Chief’,” Jefferson said with a nervous laugh, but Derryman did not respond.

One of the doors was opened almost as soon as the chime ended. Amanda Beale stood there, bleary-eyed but a little more stable than she’d been at the taping an hour ago. She was wearing the same clothes, a pair of brown slacks and a white blouse that was beginning to yellow from a few too many washings. “In,” she said, and turned away from them, her job done.

With Derryman going first, they crossed the threshold into a homey apartment with a dark blue throw rug on the hardwood floor, plenty of solid-looking American-crafted furniture and on the walls pieces of framed nature-themed artwork that Jefferson Jericho figured could be bought by the yard at any Pottery Barn. He couldn’t help but watch the roll of Amanda Beale’s hips as she walked away and wonder if she still shagged the top guy or if they played musical beds around here when they weren’t thinking about aliens and the end of the world. He wouldn’t mind giving that a shot, so to speak.

Then he felt the silver eyes upon him, and he ducked his head a little bit.

“Good afternoon,” said the President as he came through a hallway in dramatic fashion. He was smiling, but it was a terrible thing to see because there was so much pain in his eyes. He wore the pleated trousers of his suit, and his white shirt was open at the neck. He stopped well short of them and did not offer his hand. “Thank you for coming up. Let’s go in the study.”

The study was off the hallway. One wall was a huge photographic mural of an aerial view of Washington, which obviously tried to make up for the lack of windows. On another wall was a large corkboard with a map of the entire United States pinned on it and also several smaller regional maps. Somebody had gone a little overboard making circles and arrows with a black Magic Marker, and Jefferson figured those were the movements of troops, tanks and fighter jets that weren’t really there. Shelves held books that seemed to be more for decoration than for reading, just like the stage set, because everything was lined up and stacked just so. A massive antique desk was the centerpoint of the room; it had an American flag carved into the wood on front and two carved eagles, one on either side. A pair of black leather chairs had been pulled up to the desk and behind it was a third. There was a fourth black leather chair in the corner and a fabric-covered sofa that tricked the eye into a question of whether it was gray or green. In any case, Jefferson thought this must’ve been carted from the Goodwill store in Salt Lake City when they ran out of taxpayer money for black leather.

“Close the door, Vance.” Beale settled himself into the swivel chair behind his desk. “Sit down here, please.” He was speaking to Ethan and Jefferson, and he motioned toward the two chairs that faced him. “Is it cool enough in here for you? We can get the air turned down, if you like.”

“I’m not from a frozen world,” said Ethan.

“Oh…right. Well…your eyes…it’s a cold color.”

Derryman sat down on the sofa, crossed his legs and prepared himself for anything, because he had no idea what Beale wanted with these two other than a declaration that the President was “curious” about them.

“We have fruit juice,” Beale said. “Apple and orange. I’d offer you something stronger, but we’re having to conserve that.” He had spoken it to Jefferson.

“Do you have coffee?” Ethan asked. Then he thought better of it, that maybe it wouldn’t be good if he had any more and he had to eliminate the liquid waste up here in the President’s bathroom. That just didn’t seem right. “Never mind, I’m fine with nothing.”

“All right.” Beale leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, as if something very important there had caught his attention. He seemed to be drifting away right before their eyes, and Jefferson had to follow the line of the man’s gaze to see if he was studying a spider or had been mesmerized by a cobweb that wafted back and forth in the breeze from the ceiling vent.

“Sorry, I’m just thinking,” said Beale, bringing himself back to the moment. “Jefferson Jericho. Yes, I remember you. It took awhile for that to click in. You know…there’s a lot on my mind these days, you understand.”

“I do.”

“But we’re not going to lie down and die,” the President said. A small tic surfaced at his left eye like a disturbance on a still pond. His hand came up and, whether unconsciously or not, rubbed the offending place as if to make it stop. “Too many have died already. Brave men and women, fighting for us. And children…they’ve died too. Do you think we should give up, lie down and die? Then…what would have been the purpose?”

“We’re a long way from giving up,” said Derryman.

“Yes, we are. The cities are coming back. You heard my speech, didn’t you?”

Jefferson nodded carefully.

“The reports I’m getting…there are people out there…not soldiers, just ordinary civilians…who are fighting back. Thank God they have guns, and two years ago I never would’ve said this but thank God some people know how to make bombs.”

“Right,” said Jefferson.

“We’ll win, eventually. The Cyphers and the Gorgons…they can’t grind us under. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. This is being worked on right this minute. Should I tell them about the G-bombs, Vance?”

Both Ethan and Jefferson saw that Derryman’s face had darkened. Ethan was able to know what was coming because the President’s mind was a tattered flag blown full of holes, but he remained silent.

“If you like,” Derryman answered, his voice barely audible.

“The G-bombs are being put together in Kentucky. In some of the caves,” Beale said, all his focus on Jefferson. “There are going to be thousands when the project is finished. It’s germ warfare. We’re going to drop those bombs on the Gorgon and Cypher strongholds. Ordinary earth bacteria, harmless to us because we’re used to them. We’re immune. But the aliens…they won’t know what hit them. Thousands of G-bombs, falling on them. You see?”

No one spoke.

“That’s how the earth was saved in War Of The Worlds,” Beale said. “We can make it happen. Then we burn the corpses and use bulldozers to bury what’s left. Corpses,” he repeated, and he frowned. “Would you say ‘carcasses’, Vance? What’s your take on that?”

The peacekeeper had to speak. “Sir, where are their strongholds?”

“Pardon?”

“Their strongholds.” Ethan felt Derryman about to interrupt, so he held up an index finger to gain himself another moment. “Where are they, on the map?”

“It doesn’t matter where they are right now,” Derryman said. “By the time the project is completed, we’ll have to reassess the situation.”

Ethan turned his head to take the man in. “Do you really believe you’re doing the correct thing?”

Again, a silence stretched. Jefferson had to shift his position and clear his throat, because suddenly the atmosphere in the room had become uncomfortably heavy.

“Jefferson Jericho!” said the President, bringing up another labored smile. “I watched your broadcast a few times. Well…twice. Amanda enjoyed the music. You had a choir on from Atlanta, one time I watched. I have to say…I never would’ve recognized you. Even now…hard to see you in there.”

“I’ll have to shave and get a shower. That’ll help.”

“And…you said the name Leon Kushman. I was thinking, trying to remember. So many people, so many faces. But then I did connect it. The party at Ginger Wright’s condo, May of 1992. We were in Little Rock for Clinton’s benefit dinner. Sure, I remember you. My God, that seems like a long time ago!”

“A lifetime,” Jefferson agreed.

“We kicked back. Everything going on around us, all kinds of crazy, and we kicked back. I remember…you seemed like a guy who was going places. Had a lot of ambition. And you made something of yourself, didn’t you?”

“I did try.”

“You did a lot more than try, Leon. But I guess I should call you Jefferson, right?”

“That’s the name on my driver’s license now.”

The comment brought forth another silence. The President abruptly swiveled his chair around to gaze at the photographic mural. It was a time before he spoke again. It was his study and maybe all that was left to him in the world, so no one rushed him or prodded.

“What a great city,” he said, and his voice seemed hushed and faraway. “All the beautiful buildings. All the monuments to dead people. I was thinking last night…just lying in bed and thinking…about the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian. Those treasures…those magnificent things. What’s happened to them, Vance?”

“I’m sure they’re still there, sir.”

“But they may not be. They may all be burned up. Everything gone. Some of those buildings were on fire when we left. By now…ashes upon ashes.”

“Don’t trouble your mind, Jason. You need to keep your head clear.”

“My head clear,” he said, and something about it sounded choked. His face was still turned toward the mural. His hands gripped the armrests. The knuckles were white. “Ethan,” he said.

“Yes sir?”

“I could ask you so many questions. But I know…I wouldn’t be able to understand all the answers. Maybe not any of them. And you might not want to give me the answers, because you realize I—we—are not capable. We’re just children, aren’t we?”

“Early teens,” Ethan said.

“I want this country to survive. Christ in Heaven…I want this world to survive.”

“Jason?” Derryman said. “I think you should—”

“Be quiet,” the President told him, but gently. “I have heard enough reports.” He turned his chair to peer into the silver eyes, and though the nervous tic still afflicted his face Beale looked calmer, more steady, yet older than he’d been a few moments before. “Tell me exactly why you believe you need to get into S-4.”

“Jason!” Derryman started to get to his feet, but the President waved any objections aside.

“This is on my watch, Vance. Mine. I’m sitting in here like a fucking dummy on a ventriloquist’s lap. Sure, I know what the commanders say and about the G-bombs and all the other stuff you bring me, but I have got to do something. So…go ahead, Ethan. Why get into S-4?”

“I protest this,” said Derryman. “It’s not necessary.”

“Sit there and be quiet or leave. I mean it, Vance. By God, I mean it. One more word and you’re out the door.”

Derryman said nothing else, but he pressed his fingers to both temples and looked like he wanted to let go a good loud scream.

“S-4,” the President prompted. “Speak.”

“As I told you, I’m here to stop this war. I can’t do that alone or unaided. I believe I was brought here to meet you, and to convince you to use your handprint to get me into that facility. Of the artifacts there, something may be of use.”

“But you can’t be certain of that,” was Beale’s next statement. “Why not?”

“I can read the human mind and I can sense many things. I am more powerful in my true form than in this one, but I needed the…call it…camouflage, to be able to communicate and move among you. There are many things I know and many things I can do, but one thing I can’t do is read the future. That book is yet to be written.” Ethan paused for the President to fully grasp what he’d just said. “I would tell you, though, that our best chance of stopping this war is not going to be found in commanders’ reports or in G-bombs. It’s going to be in what you would call alien technology. You have proof of the power of that, here in this installation. It’s worth going to the S-4 location to at least let me see what’s there.”

“Three hours’ flight on the helicopter,” Derryman dared to say, “through skies ruled by the Gorgons and the Cyphers, for the purpose of a fishing trip?” His jutting jaw announced that he was ready for any kind of fight to protect his charge and his territory. “Jason, do you know the risk of that? This…whatever he is…admits the aliens want him dead. They’ll come after the ’copter and swat us down as soon as we get airborne!”

“They will come after us,” Ethan agreed. “The Cyphers have a tracker in the atmosphere that’s aimed at me. They’ll know when we leave, and they’ll do one of two things: either attack us in the air or follow us to where we’re going. They’ll be curious about our destination, and so will the Gorgons. I believe that may keep them from interfering with the flight.”

“This is a choice?” Derryman asked bitterly. “I’m not hearing any positives!”

“Absolutes are difficult to predict. The odds, as you might say, are stacked against us. But I’ll give you two predictions: This installation will be attacked again, more fiercely the next time. And without some means of stopping this war that I don’t yet have, your world is finished. But you won’t care, sir, because none of you here will live beyond tomorrow or the following day.”

“Because they want you. If you left here, they’d leave us alone.”

“They might, but I’m sure you’re already aware that neither side cares to make peace with your civilization. The reason they want me destroyed, Mr. Derryman, is reason enough for you to help me get into S-4.”

“No. Wrong. We’ve got to stay where we are. Conserve,” he said. His face seemed to have grown a harder skin. “Conserve,” he repeated, now desperately, and his eyes behind the glassses darted between Beale and Ethan with a wet shine of not only anger but a touch of madness.

The President lowered his head. The tic was still bothering him. He rubbed at the place of its origin, where the nerves were corrupted. Ethan could read the confusion of the man’s thoughts, the need to get into action against a crippling fear that he would find he could do nothing, that he was useless and ineffectual and the country had been lost on his watch. That was the worst thing in the tormented mind, the knowledge that for all the power of his office, he was nearly insignificant against the might of the Gorgons and Cyphers.

At last Beale looked up.

Not at Ethan, but at Jefferson Jericho.

“You’re a man of God,” the President said. “I trust you. What should I do?”

For once in his life, Jefferson was unable to speak.

He saw it then. The purpose of his being here. The real purpose, it seemed, of his measure of days. He was being given a second chance, what might be called a shot at redemption, and maybe the peacekeeper couldn’t see the future, that book was yet to be written, but he remembered Ethan saying to Dave We might need this man, so there had been some inkling that he should not be thrown aside or executed or left to die out on the highway like a diseased dog.

At least that’s what Jefferson wanted to believe, in this moment that came upon him with an overwhelming, nearly heart-stopping force. He felt pushed back into his chair as if all the old air was being forced from a small puncture in his soul.

“You should trust Ethan,” he said. “Do what he asks.”

The President sat silently, staring into Jefferson’s eyes.

“Jason.” Derryman’s voice had weakened. “You can’t go out there. If we lose you, it’s all over.”

“When can the helicopter be ready?” Beale asked.

“Please…we can figure something out. You don’t have to—”

“The helicopter. When can it be ready?”

The reply was awhile in coming, because Vance Derryman clasped his hands together and worked his knuckles and did not want to surrender. The President waited.

“Two hours, give or take,” Derryman finally said. He looked like a man in severe conflict, but he’d realized that his first duty was to obey. “It’s been a long time since Garrett or Neilsen have flown. I’d like to put them in the simulator first.”

“Do that,” Beale said. No one could mistake that it was an official command.

“If I can’t talk you out of this in the next two hours,” Derryman told him, “I’m going with you. No argument on that point.”

“No argument, but my mind is made up. Fuel the ’copter, get the pilots ready, get whatever we need. Let’s find out what’s in S-4.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Ethan. “And thank you,” he said to Jefferson Jericho, who also had decided to go on the flight. Jefferson had come so far, it was not something he wanted to miss no matter what the danger. He thought Dave would feel the same way, and maybe Olivia would too.

There was much to be done. President Beale dismissed them, and they left the apartment to get themselves ready for a journey into the unknown.

Thirty-Two.

A heavy-duty tractor towed the big, dark green VH-71

Kestrel helicopter from its hangar onto the helipad on the western side of the White Mansion. This version of Marine One carried only the identification number ‘AA3’ just aft of the cockpit. Small blue lamps outlined the helipad’s edges. A wind had picked up from the northwest bringing an acidic smell of poisoned rain. The clouds had thickened to blot out the last of the sun’s rays, and the light was cut to a dim, grayish cast.

The passengers were already aboard. Along with President Beale and Vance Derryman were Foggy Winslett, Ethan, Dave, Olivia, and sitting at the back of the cabin two uniformed and helmeted Marines armed with 9mm Colt submachine guns, frag grenades and automatic pistols. The seats were beige-colored fabric and there were two sofas along the left wall the same color and fabric. The windows were covered with dark blue curtains. Light strips glowed along the ceiling, and there was a small table with a lamp on it. The lampshade, Ethan noted, still wore its plastic dust cover. Dignifying the President’s armchair was the Presidential seal. Soon there came the low growl of the three turboshaft engines warming up. The noise grew in power. None of the passengers spoke; this was going to be a trip that tested the nerves, and no one felt like talking. The two Marines had volunteered for the assignment and the pilots, Garrett and Neilsen, had flown Super Stallion transport ’copters from aircraft carriers off Iraq. Everyone knew their job and was professional, though it had been so long since the pilots had been up, they welcomed some time in the simulator.

Dave pulled a curtain aside for a look out. Beyond the window was a bleak and threatening sky, but the light show of battling warships had ceased. Either their combat had ended in the defeat of one side, or the fight had whirled on many miles distant.

Everyone was buckled in. Garrett’s voice came over the intercom: “We’re three minutes from liftoff, lady and gentlemen. Welcome aboard, it’s our privilege to serve.” To his credit, he sounded perfectly in control and perfectly at peace with the idea of flying Marine One into the teeth of the alien enemy.

The rotors started up. Their noise was muffled to a civilized rumble by the construction of the helicopter, made to allow the President to attend to business while in flight.

Though there was no conversation, Ethan could look at a person, give them his full attention, and ‘hear’ their thoughts like a voice in a dark room. Scanning the people here, he was nearly overwhelmed. What human emotion was not riding in this helicopter? He did the best thing he could; he leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and allowed everyone their privacy, and himself a chance to rest.

The Kestrel lifted smoothly off from its helipad and rose above the White Mansion. Keeping just below the clouds, it took a southeasterly turn and flew toward its destination at one hundred and seventy miles per hour.

H

Ethan, Dave, and Olivia had gone to the infirmary to visit Hannah and Nikki. Hannah was drugged and haggard. She looked ninety years old and as lost as an orphan child. She didn’t make much sense when she talked, but she lay in her bed and at least seemed to be listening when Olivia had told her where they were going.

“Will you be back?” Hannah had asked in a slow murmur, as if afraid a louder voice might bring a monster back from the dead. She grasped the other woman’s offered hand. “Say you’ll be back, Olivia. We can’t keep going without you.”

“We’ll be back,” Olivia promised. She herself was in need of more rest and another Valium or two, but she had, as Dave had once said to Jefferson, put her balls on. No matter what was ahead, she had to be there to see it, and she thought Vincent would have approved.

“Panther Ridge can’t hold on without you,” Hannah continued. She shivered as if struck by a thought like a bullet and her hand tightened on Olivia’s. “Where’s JayDee? I need to see JayDee.”

“He’s around somewhere,” Olivia said. “Not far.”

“You’re the leader,” Hannah told her. “You’ve always been the leader. You have to come back. You and Dave both. Is that Ethan there? My eyes are so screwed up.”

“It’s me,” Ethan said.

“I saw you…when you ran into that parking lot. The high school. I saw what happened to the cars and the trucks.” She tried to focus on Olivia again. “They came alive,” she said, as if sharing the most awesome and terrible secret. “Dave said keep that quiet, so I did. Ethan?”

“Yes?”

“Protect them. They have to come back to Panther Ridge. All of you do.”

“I know he’ll do his best,” Olivia said. “You rest now, just try to sleep. Can we get anything for you before we go?”

“Time,” the old woman said weakly. “More time.” She was already drifting away from them, into what Olivia hoped was the safety of her dreams. They stayed with her until her hand fell away from Olivia’s, the drugs took her down again, and for at least a little while she had left this embattled world.

“I have to see Nikki,” Ethan said. “I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

He found her in a bed in another room where the walls were painted pale green and there were framed prints of flowers. She had a table and a lamp beside her. She was sitting up against two pillows, there was a plastic cup of orange juice on the table and the remnants of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a small blue plate. She’d been paging through an old copy of a magazine called Elle when Ethan looked into the room.

“Hi,” he said, in his closest emulation of a fifteen-year-old boy’s tone of voice. “Can I come in?”

Her single chocolate-colored eye stared at him. The star of her eyepatch glittered under the overhead light, which was powered by a technology a thousand times older than her. Some color had returned to her face, she had taken a shower and the waves of her blonde hair were clean and freshly brushed. The peacekeeper thought it was very good that she was drinking and eating and reading, though reading about the world that used to be and seeing the pretty pictures did nothing to lighten the sadness in her soul.

He knew she missed Ethan. She had come with him on this trip because she had trusted him, and he’d left her without a word of goodbye. It was not the boy’s fault, it was his own necessity, the way the plan had always been since the moment of his arrival. It was indeed not fair, it was indeed a cruelty, and though the peacekeeper’s intent was on the benefit of the Many he did have feeling for the emotions of the One.

He had existed a long time, longer than Nikki Stanwick could comprehend. He was nothing she could fully understand. But in all that time he had never faced a situation such as this, and he didn’t know what to say.

He could feel her deciding whether to invite him in or not, and he almost backed off and went away to spare her any more of him, but then she said, quietly, still uncertain but willing to give him a chance, “Sure.”

He went in.

“Nice room,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

“Got everything you need?”

“I guess.”

“Weird not to have windows.”

“Weird,” she said. “That’s funny, coming from you.”

“Yes…” He hesitated and tried that again: “Yeah, I know it is.”

“Don’t try to talk like him,” she said. “You’re not him. Don’t pretend.”

“Oh. Yes. Okay.” He nodded. “You’re right, I could never be him.”

“Did you come here for some reason?”

“I did. Dave, Olivia, and I are leaving here in a couple of hours. We’re going with President Beale in his helicopter to Area 51. Well…an area called S-4. It’s where research is done on alien artifacts.” He decided to simplify that. “Things taken from flying saucers that have crashed. I think—I hope—something may be there I can use.”

“You mean…like…a ray gun or something?”

“I’m not sure a ray gun would stop this war, but I’ll take what I can get.”

“Hm,” she said. It was a moment before she spoke again, and Ethan heard the words as they formed in her mind. “Actually…that’s kind of cool.”

Ethan didn’t know where to rest his silver eyes. He knew they creeped her out. One had been ‘kind of cool’, but two were too much.

“What do those letters on your chest mean?” she asked. “Why did they come up? How come when you’re touched your skin turns silver there?”

Everything came from the greater power, Ethan thought. Everything to remind him that he was in the service of that power, and though he wore a suit of skin he was not permitted to believe he was one of them, even for an instant.

“General Winslett wears colored bars on his chest to signify battles he’s been in, or medals he’s been given,” the peacekeeper said. “These are mine. Each symbol has a meaning, and together they spell out my purpose: Guardian, in your language.”

“I’ve seen runes like that before. Don’t they come from Earth?”

“They’re very ancient. I imagine they found their way to this world somehow, maybe in a crashed ship or as a gift. I’m sure other symbols did, and are considered now to be ancient or unknown languages. Sorry…I know I’m sounding kind of…” He searched for the word. “Weird,” was what he came up with. “As for my skin—Ethan’s skin—turning silver at the touch…I believe it’s a chemical reaction.” Living tissue to tissue that I am keeping alive by my own life force, he thought, but he didn’t want to speak this because to Nikki this would be way beyond the boundaries of weird.

“I understand,” she replied. Then she frowned. “I guess. Wow,” she said. “What my buds at the Bowl-A-Rama would have thought about this!”

“They would never have believed it, even if I was standing next to you. They’d think I was made up for…” He shrugged.

“A horror movie,” Nikki said.

He smiled a little bit. “Am I that bad?”

“With those eyes, you’re as scary as hell,” she said, giving him the truth.

“Let’s hope I can scare the Gorgons and Cyphers into ending this war.”

“Yeah,” she said, “let’s hope.”

Again he searched for the right language. Communication on this world seemed to be a matter of figuring out what sequence of words would hurt someone the least. “I’m sorry I took him away so suddenly,” he said at last.

“You said it was time, and I guess he knew that. You don’t have to tell me you’re sorry. Anyway…you’re something—somebody, I mean—special. Like astral. So who I am to say you did wrong?”

“Because even something astral can make a mistake. You came with us because you trusted him. I took him away from you. From all of you. I should’ve allowed him more time.”

“Well,” she said, “he’s out of this now, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So I ought to be happy…but I really do miss him. He was a pretty cool guy.” She gave him back a tender, wistful smile. “And you’re pretty cool too, but you’re not him.”

“Weird, scary, but cool,” the peacekeeper said. “What more can an astral entity ask for?”

She was able to laugh, and he thought it was a beautiful sound. She had a distance to go, but she was going to be all right. Now he had to find a way to do what was needed, for Nikki and Olivia, for Dave and JayDee and Hannah, for everyone who had struggled on and lived with fading hope. Even for the memory of those who had withered away and died in barren misery, and even for Jefferson Jericho, who’d fulfilled a role that Ethan had not fully realized was waiting for him.

“Can I bring you anything?” he asked.

“No, I’m good.”

“Well…I suppose I should go now.”

“Ethan?” she said as he started to withdraw. He hesitated. “I forgive you, if you want to hear that,” she said. “But you did the right thing.”

“Thank you, Nikki,” he answered, because though he was not human and was far from being so he did need to hear that, just as much as if he’d been born from this Earth and not created in what seemed like a dream in the unknowable mind of the greater power.

Then he left her, and he continued on to where he needed to go.

H

The VH-71 Kestrel was in sure and steady hands. It flew into the gathering darkness, all its identification strobes turned off, the noise of the rotors a muffled hum within the helicopter’s soundproofed cabin.

They had been flying over an hour. Ethan opened his eyes and felt the Cypher tracker on him like a hot spot at the top of his head. It was always on him, and had been following since the Kestrel had left its helipad. Now there were other things out there, too. It only took him a few seconds to process the harmonic signals of two Gorgon warships, one to the east and one to the west, on courses parallel to their flight path. They were drifting along, following the tracker embedded in the back of Jefferson’s neck. Each ship was still over a hundred miles away; that distance was nothing to them, they could eat that distance up in less than ten seconds if they went to a higher speed, but Ethan sensed that they were moving slowly, not wanting to get too close. Of course, they reasoned he could feel them. There might be a specialized entity on board each craft who could sense Ethan’s awareness of them. They were in no hurry. And they were being cautious too, because on his own highly-tuned mental radar, he could “see” the movements of the sleek black Cypher warships prowling through the clouds at a higher altitude. There were five of them in a precise V-shaped formation. Those also were over a hundred miles distant, yet could speed across the miles in less than the time it would take for Ethan to tell Vance Derryman that they were being stalked.

But Ethan knew that Derryman already figured the Cyphers and Gorgons were not very far away. No one in this helicopter doubted that they were being followed. So Ethan closed his eyes again and rested while he kept his mental eye open for any change of speed in the warships. It would do no good to increase the anxiety of anyone here, particularly not Derryman, General Winslett, the President, or the pilots. They were aware; that was enough.

The flight continued without incident. Everyone was free to get up, to use the bathroom, to get a drink of water or a canned soft drink from the bar. At one point the President got up and stretched, and he went through the door into the cockpit and stayed there awhile. Derryman and Winslett talked in hushed whispers. Ethan declined to listen either to their words or the creation of those words in their minds. But they were deeply afraid, that was apparent. Neither one had dared to pull aside a curtain and look out a window since the flight had begun.

Dave slept, or pretended to, while Jefferson went back to talk nervously but earnestly with the two Marines. Olivia got up to use the bathroom, then she returned to her seat and remained quiet, lost in her thoughts. Ethan once did penetrate Olivia’s mind to see what was there and found the image of a lean, handsome, and sun-browned man with a gray goatee smiling as she opened a present at a party. There were many other happy people in the room, where flames crackled in the fireplace and the furniture was fine but not ostentatious. A birthday cake with pink icing sat on a table, next to the cameo of a horse’s head carved into a piece of white stone. When Olivia finished opening the present—not tearing the gold-colored wrapping but being as careful with it and the white ribbon as if those too were part of the gift—she opened a box and withdrew a black sphere with the number eight on it in a white circle.

“Just what I need!” Olivia said. “A ball full of answers to every question!” She was much younger-looking and fifteen pounds healthily heavier than her current condition. She held the Magic Eight Ball up for everyone to see, and Vincent raised a glass of wine and started to make a toast and that was when the moment crumbled because Olivia was losing the memory of what his voice had exactly sounded like. So in Olivia’s silent distress, Ethan had left her mind as she jumped ahead and was blowing out five white candles on a strawberry cake, her favorite.

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.

Their destination was about forty miles ahead. They were going to have to creep to it, but the two pilots were the kind of men who kept flying even when the vibration shook the fillings out of their teeth, and unless the ’copter went down hard and fast, they intended to reach the appointed place. It wasn’t all bravery; where else were they going to set down, out here in this nightmare world?

“Take her,” Garrett told Neilsen, and he went back to check on his passengers. He found the cabin in shambles, a Marine dead with a broken neck, the alien boy with a broken left arm and shoulder and probably more. The alien was being supported between the man with the baseball cap and the Hispanic woman. The President was all right, though he was sucking on a cylinder of oxygen through a plastic mask. Derryman and the general were ashen-faced, and from the way Winslett’s eyes darted around, he looked ready to squeeze himself out the broken window. The other man, whom he’d heard was a televangelist of some fame, was sitting in his seat with his eyes shut looking like he was communing with Jesus. The second Marine was okay, he was twenty-three years old and a tough little fireplug of a guy and thought everybody in the world would die before it was his turn, so his attitude carried him through.

Garrett opened a compartment and slid the med kit out. A packet of pain pills was in there amid items such as antiseptic hand cleanser, a roll of elastic bandages, scissors, and insect bite swabs. The alien shook his head—no, no, he didn’t want to ingest chemicals—but the man and the woman convinced him, and he swallowed two with a cup of water. Winslett asked for a couple, though it didn’t appear he was injured anywhere, and Garrett complied. When Garrett asked the President if he needed any, he got back a “Hell, no, just fly this fucker.”

Garrett decided he could help the boy—what looked like a boy—a little further, and he quickly fashioned a sling out of the elastic bandages. He didn’t know whether the alien would be in more discomfort with the sling than without it, but at least that broken arm wouldn’t be dangling. “Let’s try this out,” he said, and to the man with the baseball cap: “Help me with this. Easy with his arm…easy, easy.”

They got Ethan’s arm into the sling. The breath hissed out from between Ethan’s teeth. The pain was severe but he would deal with it, as long as he could hold onto consciousness. It occurred to him how much of the human life involved pain; it was part of their existence, either physical pain or pain of the soul. They were strong, to inhabit such fragile bodies; to be sure, they were stronger than their bodies, for those who appeared to be weak could be the strongest in will and heart. That was why he was attracted to this body, because the boy had fought so hard to live. Now, though, Ethan realized quite certainly that the damage this body had sustained was severe, and he was running out of time. He could keep injured systems going, injured lungs breathing, and the heart pumping blood through dead tissues, but he could not repair the fractures; his left arm was useless.

And there was another thing, alarming even to him.

“They’re coming again,” he said, to anyone who would listen.

“How many?” Dave asked.

“The other four. And…the Gorgon ships are coming in too, very fast. The Cyphers will be here in…they’re here now,” he said. “Two on each side.”

With a start of terror, Jefferson tore his curtain aside to look out. There was no movement in the dark, no lights, nothing. The helicopter juddered along on its southwesterly course.

“Let me go!” Ethan told Dave and the pilot. “Let me get to a window! They’re about to open—”

The warships opened fire.

But it was not the Cyphers who began firing, it was the Gorgons, and their targets were the Cypher ships. Suddenly hundreds of burning blue streaks came from the clouds and hit the Cyphers on both sides of the helicopter. Blue explosions and bursts of shimmering flame shot up. An instant later hundreds of red streaks showed the return fire from the Cyphers, and caught in the midst of the battle was Marine One.

Fiery red spheres and bolts of blue lightning crisscrossed the sky. Blasts echoed through the night, which was no longer dark. Clearly seen in the leaping light of the explosions were the massive Cypher ships, but the Gorgons were up in the clouds and out of sight. Neilsen was dancing the Kestrel through the turbulence of alien fire. Through the window that Jefferson had uncurtained, Ethan saw a red sphere that had missed its original target coming right at the helicopter. It was going to cut them in two. He had an instant to react, and in that instant he shattered the window glass outward with the thrust of an index finger and with the twist of his hand turned the sphere aside so it sizzled past just above the helicopter’s tail rotor.

“Land it! Land it!” Derryman was shouting, but there was no place to land down there.

Some of the spheres and energy bolts were hitting the earth beneath them, punching blackened craters into the ground, and throwing into the air slabs of rock the size of trucks. Hillsides either convulsed or collapsed and storms of dust plumed up. Though terrified, Jefferson was transfixed by the sight of the hundreds of glowing trails and spears of alien firepower; the battle held a mesmerizing beauty, like the most gaudy and expensive fireworks show that had ever blazed the night over New Eden. The sight of pieces of a Cypher warship burning with blue fire and spinning down two thousand feet to the ground broke the spell, but still Jefferson was held in awe.

Suddenly the remaining three Cypher ships levitated themselves straight up into the clouds, moving silently and with a speed that made mockery of any earthly aircraft. The battle continued with bursts of flame back and forth, but the crippled helicopter was out of the line of fire. Neilsen put the landing gear down and headed them toward the ground, their destination only a few miles away.

Garrett had done all he could. He returned to the cockpit, while Dave helped Ethan into a seat and buckled him up.

“Hang on!” Dave had to shout over the shriek of the engines through the broken windows. He knew it was a weak statement, but he had no idea what else to say; Ethan was sweating and shivering and obviously in a lot of pain, so—

“Yes I am,” the peacekeeper answered, “but I will hang on.”

Dave and Olivia both buckled up. The Kestrel shuddered and groaned as it neared the ground, stirring up whirlwinds of dust. Jefferson thought that there was no way this busted bird could get back to the White Mansion; whenever and wherever this thing touched down, that was where they were planted for a long time to come unless there was another ’copter or a plane they could use. But he didn’t want to think about that right now. He was part of the team, and he wasn’t giving up on Ethan.

“Touchdown coming up!” Garrett said over the intercom, which had been cranked to full volume. “Don’t know how we’ll land, so brace yourselves!”

The Kestrel went in, its rotors blowing dust in all directions. The pilot showed his mettle by touching down with hardly a thump.

“Easy-peasey,” Garrett said, with what was maybe an audible exhalation of breath. “Right on target, Mr. President.”

The engines were cut, the rotors whined down, the exit door was opened and the stairs lowered. First out into the dusty dark was the remaining soldier, who scanned all around through a pair of night-

vision goggles and then took up a position where he could open fire on any threat. Before anyone else descended the stairs, Dave paused to retrieve the dead Marine’s rifle and slide the pistol into the waistband of his jeans. Derryman, pale and shaken from the flight, started to protest but Beale said, “Tell Corporal Suarez this man is coming off the ’copter armed, and I’ve given my approval.” The President’s facial tic had returned, and he too was shaky, but his voice was surprisingly strong. Derryman went off to obey the command, and Winslett followed him.

“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.

Everyone else had seen too. The peacekeeper looked at Dave and smiled tightly. “I guess I’m back where Ethan began,” he said, and he wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans. Dave had to shift his gaze to the floor.

The elevator slowed and stopped. The doors slid open. Ahead of them was a long corridor that looked to be made of stainless steel and was rounded like a vein through a body. Corporal Suarez left the elevator first, then Derryman and Winslett. Beale followed them and then the others with Jefferson last.

The President led them forward. The corridor branched to both left and right. He took the group to the left and continued forty more yards to a solid slab of a door also made of stainless steel. Another keypad and a monitor screen were mounted in the wall. Beale went through the process of keying in the numbers once more and the crisp female voice said, “Good evening again, Mr. President. Please verify.” The screen came on, the outline of the hand appeared and the verification was made. There came the sound of two locks disengaging.

The door appeared heavy, but obviously it was not, because Beale was able to pull it open with its rubber-coated handle using a minimum of effort. The door seemed to float open. Tube lights at the ceiling were already on. Cool air began to be circulated, but Olivia thought even before crossing the threshold—which had an electric eye implanted in it—that she smelled the dry, medicinal odor of a hospital.

They entered, and when the door closed behind them, the two locks engaged.

The first chamber was a glassed-in space with three rows of theater seats much like the President’s television studio, but here the seats faced two large flatscreens. A door led into a larger room, sixty feet long if an inch. Pale green tiles covered the walls and the floor was made of gray tiles. The overhead light fixtures were round, like flying saucers. A digital clock on the wall was still running and reported the time as 20:38 in white numerals. Another stainless steel door stood at the far end of the room, with a square red warning light of some kind above it. The surgery, Ethan thought, picking it up from the mind of Foggy Winslett. And more from the general, a flare of fear: Don’t want to go in there hell no, no way. Too many bad memories of the bodies…

“Here,” said President Beale, “are the artifacts.”

He was standing before the glass double doors of a smaller room off to the right. Jefferson figured it to be about the size of a nice walk-in cigar humidor. Within the room, under the glow of the light tubes, were lucite shelves on which eight different items rested. Below the items were little identifying letters and numbers printed on clear stick-on labels: FL12255 under what appeared to be an ordinary piece of dark-colored iron, IA240873 beneath a metallic sphere not much larger than a baseball, AR060579 beneath a featureless black cube, and so on.

“Those came from crashed spaceships?” Jefferson asked, his sense of wonder now in overdrive. “Jesus!”

“A couple of them,” Beale said, “were shot down by missiles. The responsibility of other presidents. One collided with a private jet at night in a thunderstorm, over Indiana. The identifiers signify what state these were found in, the day, the month, and the year they were recovered. There have been seven others that self-destructed after awhile, but again that was before my time. All the records, the ships, and the bodies are kept somewhere else.” Beale turned to look at Ethan. “We’ve gone over these things with the best possible minds available, which is not easy considering the security involved. We don’t think any of these are weapons, but do you think differently?”

“I need to get closer,” the peacekeeper said.

Beale opened one of the doors for him, and he hobbled through on his own power. “Come in if you want to,” he told Dave, Olivia, and Jefferson. “You’ve come this far…take a few more steps.”

They went in. Beale followed and shut the door behind him, and neither Derryman nor Winslett showed any inclination to want to enter. Ethan scanned the objects.

He didn’t know exactly what each one was, but he sensed no warlike energy. “Can I touch anything?”

“If you can’t, who could? Pick up that piece of FL12255. But before you do, think of an earthly material…a texture, the skin of something…whatever. Go ahead.”

Ethan visualized water as he remembered it rising from the bottom of the swimming pool at Panther Ridge. When he put his hand on the piece of iron, it became a puddle of iron-colored liquid. When he withdrew his hand, it crawled itself back into its original shape. Dust, he thought, and putting his hand on the object it became a powdery iron-colored substance. As soon as the touch was broken, it turned back into what it had been…which the peacekeeper realized was a transmutable material tuned to the thoughts of whoever had physical contact with it.

“My Lord,” Olivia said softly.

Ethan picked up the metallic sphere. It looked as if it were jointed together in about a dozen places. It was heavy, but not too much for one hand.

“Balance it on the tip of a finger,” Beale said.

It seemed too heavy for that, but Ethan tried using his index finger. When it should have fallen, it did not; it balanced there and was perfectly weightless. In another few seconds, the ball lifted off his finger three inches and hung there. Then it started rotating. The joints began to open and close with rapid succession, but soundlessly, and suddenly there was a sixth entity in the room.

It stood slim and tall, a little over seven feet, in appearance a male humanoid albino with pale eyes and shoulder-length white hair. Jewels sparkled along the edges of both ears, which were again very much similar to those of humans but curled just slightly inward. The being wore a long white gown decorated with dozens of shining gold figures that made Olivia think of ancient Aztec pictographs she’d seen with Vincent in the National Museum of History in Mexico City. The being smiled beatifically, offered his long-fingered hands in an obvious attitude of friendship and began to speak in a quiet voice that was like no language the Earth-dwellers had ever heard; it was full of pops and clicks and what sounded like stuttering. When he was finished, in about half a minute, the entity bowed his head and faded out. The sphere stopped its rotation and settled back onto the tip of Ethan’s finger, where it remained until Beale took it and returned it to its proper place.

“We’ve tried to decipher the message,” the President said. “We think it’s something to do with medicine. There’s a sound in there that means the same as in a language known as ‘Comecrudan’, but that was extinct by the mid-1880s.”

“You’re exactly right,” Ethan said.

“What?”

“It’s about medicine. I know that language, and I know that civilization. He was offering your world the cure for cancer.”

Beale didn’t speak, and neither did anyone else from planet Earth.

“He was telling you,” Ethan went on, “that the cure for cancer is depicted in the symbols on his gown. Is this from one of the ships that was shot down?”

“It happened a long time ago,” the President said.

“I see,” Ethan replied. His hand went to his left side to try to ease some of the pain there of fractured ribs and raw nerves.

He took stock of the other objects: a small humanoid-looking figurine fashioned from a metal that shimmered with many colors, a square of what appeared to be ordinary window glass but was only a few millimeters in thickness, a coil of delicately fine silver-colored wire, and the rest of them.

“There are no weapons here,” the peacekeeper said. “These are gifts.”

“Gifts,” the President repeated, hollowly.

“Brought to you—foolishly—by civilizations wanting to make contact. You weren’t ready for that. You were far from ready, and they learned that lesson.”

“No weapons?” Jefferson sounded distraught. “None? Ethan, there’s nothing here?”

Ethan didn’t answer.

“What is that?” he asked President Beale. He lifted his hand to point at the small black cube. Arizona, the sixth day of May, 1979.

“A mystery,” the President said.

Ethan picked it up. It was light, and again it could be easily managed with one hand, and could sit right in the palm. The sides were smooth and featureless, the dimensions perfect.

“No substance that we know of on Earth,” Beale said, “can drill into it or leave a mark on it. X-rays can’t see into it. No medical or military device we have can look inside that thing. So it just sits there doing nothing. The scientists figured that if it was going to blow up the world it would have already, but they were so afraid of it they kept it in a lead-lined vault for over twenty years.”

“Maybe you’re supposed to paint white dots on it and hang it from your rearview mirror,” said Dave, who was beginning to realize that there was truly nothing here, that the Cyphers and Gorgons were having one hell of a battle over their heads, and there was probably no way to get back to the White Mansion, which itself was as safe as an open wound.

Ethan pondered the object. Neither could he penetrate what was inside it, but…