The ride in the van was a long sequence of disjointed imagery. Evi tried to force her mind on one track of thinking. The effort had the edge of desperation, and she embraced it. The feeling of desperation helped to fight the sense of apathy that enveloped her like quicksand.
If she closed her eyes and concentrated, to the exclusion of the outside world, she could think straight.
The first coherent thought she had was that there was no way she could escape this situation while she was drugged. But the fact that she could force herself to think coherently meant the effects of the drug were waning. Her metabolism tended to race such things through her body. If she got lucky, Dimitri wouldn’t know that.
One consolation about her capture. It looked as if they assumed she was still working solo, or with Frey’s people. They didn’t seem to be aware of the moreaus; that was good. If Gurgueia followed her orders, they would track the cargo van to its destination. With Fernando, they’d complete some of the mission, getting some record of the aliens’ existence on video.
Only surveillance footage of aliens being transported from point A to point B wouldn’t be as effective as their original idea of broadcasting straight from the alien habitat itself. However, it might still shake something loose.
Unfortunately, for her that was all moot now. She had hoped the plan would nullify the reasons everyone wanted her, dead or otherwise. With a public broadcast, Hofstadter couldn’t keep his secrets by killing her, the Agency couldn’t save itself embarrassment by disappearing her, and, if they’d done it right, Nyogi would have other problems than kidnapping her.
Now, it seemed, Nyogi wanted something from her, beyond getting their people back. From what she remembered of Dimitri’s speech, whatever that was, it wasn’t pleasant.
The van came to a stop and she opened her eyes. The world became disjointed again, but it was easier for her to concentrate. The van had parked in a huge elevator, easily the size of Diana’s entire loft. There was the whir of distant motors, and the ceiling was receding above her. She found herself focusing on a concrete beam in the ceiling above that must have had a cross section larger than the van’s.
She forced her gaze down, into the van. The only residents were herself and Dimitri. Dimitri was covering her with an unsilenced Mitsubishi.
Where were the Afghanis?
Dimitri seemed to notice her looking. “The canines aren’t allowed where you’re going. Few creatures are, other than the Race themselves.”
“Race?” She managed to slur.
“What they call themselves.”
She found that, with a considerable effort, she could keep her gaze locked on the peeper. “Why,” she forced herself to say, “you work for . . .” It took too much effort, she let the question trail off.
“Why’d a human turn on his whole planet?” Dimitri smiled. “Why’d a nonhuman work for a bunch of humans?”
That sliced through the fog. “I never had a choice.” Her voice actually sounded coherent that time.
“We all have choices, Isham,” Dimitri said. “Sometimes we make the wrong ones to save our asses.”
The elevator came to a halt, and Dimitri pressed a button on the dash that opened the rear door.
It wasn’t until the door opened that she realized that the air conditioning in the van had been going full blast. Heat slammed into the van in a wet, rancid blast. She turned to look out the rear doors and saw a massive room beyond. The room was a warehouse. She could see crates, robot forklifts, and cargo haulers in a massive loading dock, everything in the room disturbingly normal.
The normalcy was disturbing because the construction of the room itself was alien. The entire warehouse area was a squashed sphere, ovoid in cross section. The ovoid was maybe a hundred meters in diameter and easily twenty meters tall at its highest point. Cones projected from the walls at regular intervals, shooting blue-green jets of fire that added to the ranks of red lights that were sunk into smooth depressions in the ceiling.
This dwarfed anything she’d seen in Cleveland.
A small robot golf cart rolled up to the back of the van. Dimitri gestured with the gun. “Get in the cart.”
Dimitri stood back in the air-conditioned van and watched her from behind his submachine gun. The heat started her sweating and made her dizzy. By the time she had dragged herself to the cart, she wanted to pass out.
It had to be forty degrees down here, she thought. It felt as if she were buried under a burning compost heap.
She closed her eyes when she collapsed in the back of the cart. She could hear Dimitri walk up to her. This was the time to make a break for it, she thought. She opened her eyes and saw Dimitri standing in front of the cart as it started moving. He faced her, never lowering the barrel of the gun. She tried to sit up, and the wave of disorientation she felt when her head moved told her that at the speed she was operating, Dimitri would put three shots in her chest before she got halfway to her feet.
The cart rolled through the cavernous warehouse. The lack of right angles or straight lines in the room made it hard for her to judge distance. Holes collected in the walls in irregular groups of eight. She couldn’t tell if the openings were small and close by or huge and impossibly far.
They passed through one of the holes long before she expected to. Suddenly she was slipping through a nearly cylindrical concrete tube that was of a much more manageable scale. It could have been a storm sewer if it weren’t for the red lights sunk into the ceiling in organically smooth pits. The concrete walls were polished to a sheen that reflected light like wet marble.
They traveled through miles of sameness. The concrete tubes had branches that resembled the inside of a stone giant’s circulatory system, and the ovoid openings that broke into the sides of the tube resembled ulcers. Most of the doors showed only darkness beyond, but behind at least one she saw a pulsing white amoebic form.
The farther they went, the hotter it became.
The cart pulled to a stop when the tube emptied into another squashed spheroid. This room was much smaller than the warehouse, twenty meters across. It was big enough for the cart to pull in and circle halfway around the perimeter, around a hole in the center of the floor.
She noticed eight corridors that slipped out of the room at regular intervals in the walls. Still in a drugged fog, she couldn’t pick the one the cart had come from.
“End of the line,” Dimitri said. “Everybody out.”
As he spoke, there was a sucking sound, and a blast of cool air came from the center of the room. She looked in that direction and saw a metal lid opening in the room’s central pit. It reminded her of a trapdoor spider. Light came from underneath it, a more reasonable white light.
“That’s where you’re going.”
She looked at him. He was sweating profusely. It might be possible . . .
She stood, and the wave of vertigo made her reconsider. She climbed out of the cart, trying to be careful of her footing, and slowly walked across the too-smooth floor toward the blessedly cool pit.
When she reached the edge, she looked down. It was a steeply angled tube that quickly slipped out of her sight. It was clear she was intended to slide down it.
Dimitri waved his gun. “Go.”
She quietly told herself that, if Dimitri and company wanted her dead, they would have killed her long before now. Then she stepped into the hole, protecting her arm with her body.
Her slide down the chute was much faster than she’d expected. The vertigo returned with a vengeance, heightened by the fact that the tube was smooth and uniformly white, giving her eyes no landmarks to lock on.
The dizziness was so intense that she didn’t realize she’d passed out.
• • •
Evi opened her eyes and found herself looking at a bearded man in his early fifties. She recognized him from the surveillance footage from the peeper’s, Dimitri’s, Long-Eighties. He was the professor type, Fitzgerald, the xenobiologist.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The quickness with which she grabbed his lapel told her she’d been out long enough for the drug to work its way out of her system. “All right?” she yelled at him. “What do you think? After you, and Frey, and everyone else screwed me over?” She pushed him away, hard, and sat up. No waves of vertigo hit her this time; for that she was grateful.
She got off the bunk she had come to on, and looked around. Fitzgerald backed toward a regular flat wall. Two bunk beds sat opposite each other in the rectangular room, and the lighting came from recessed fluorescent tubes. An air conditioner thrummed low in the background, and cool breezes flowed from vents high in the walls.
She stood in a room normal-looking enough for her to briefly think that her travel through that alien environment had been a drug-induced hallucination. It hadn’t been. She could still smell the taint of sulfur and burning methane that filtered through the overworked air conditioner.
If she had any other doubt, the fact that the only entrance to the room was a circular hole on the far wall between the bunks showed that what she’d seen was more than a hallucination. The drug might have played with her sense of scale, but what she had seen of the alien habitat must’ve covered several acres at least.
Fitzgerald took a tentative step forward. “Miss Isham?”
“WHAT?” She advanced on him, feeling three days’ worth of adrenaline course through her blood. “What, by the name of all that’s holy, what could you possibly have to say to me?”
Fitzgerald sputtered, “But—”
“Are you going to tell me how sorry you are? You folks didn’t mean to keep me in the dark. You didn’t mean to make me a traitor!” She pushed him to the wall with her good hand. “Or are you going to apologize for being the one to hand your own conspiracy back to the damn aliens. You were the one, weren’t you?
“How about Gabriel? How did you feel about him trying to blow me away?”
“He’s dead,” Fitzgerald said in a hoarse whisper.
“What?” She realized that she had wrapped her right hand around the professor’s throat. It dawned on her that she could have killed the man. She backed away and began deep-breathing exercises. “Who’s dead?”
“Everyone,” Fitzgerald croaked. “Gabriel, Davidson, Frey. Hofstadter tried to blame it all on you—”
She thought back over what had happened to her.
“How did Davidson and Gabriel die?”
“Their car crashed on the Southeast side of Manhattan.”
The aircar, she thought, the one that had chased her into Greenwich Village. “I’m sorry I jumped on you.”
He shook his head. “Did you kill Frey?”
“No!” She could still smell Frey’s blood, still feel the panic she’d felt then, when she first began to realize the scope of what had happened.
“Gabe and Davidson—”
“Were trying to kill me.”
“You have to understand.” Fitzgerald wrung his hands. “This was never supposed to become violent. It was research—”
She snorted.
“—first contact with an alien species. Do you have any idea what that means?”
Evi sat down. “I have a pretty damn good idea.” The air-conditioning vents were too small, the tube was an impossible climb, and the walls were solid concrete. She was stuck here with the professor.
“It was my life,” he went on. “Can’t you realize—”
“Your profession,” she snapped. “My fucking life.”
Fitzgerald lapsed into silence.
The quiet got on her nerves. “So, in six years of research, did you find out anything useful?”
He walked over and sat down on the bunk across from her. “What do you want to know about them?”
“Everything.”
Fitzgerald obliged her.
The Race had developed on a nearby world, a massive, hot, tectonically active ball of rock circling a dim reddish sun. They had populated a number of planets, between six and a dozen of them, including a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A. They were very aware of Earth and the creatures populating it.
They needed the resources of the planets they’d colonized, and Earth was a potential rival. Once Earth reached out of its solar system, there’d be a costly war for territory on those new planets.
As Earth turned on, into another millennium, the Race had a political dilemma. How to prevent a seemingly inevitable conflict. The decision, after a long-distance study of Earth’s culture, was a covert operation. The aliens on Earth would prevent any force on the planet from gaining the technical expertise or the inclination for interstellar travel for as long as possible.
“It’s interesting,” Fitzgerald said, “to see how mankind isn’t the only species capable of hypocrisy and self-delusion.”
Evi ignored the subtle racism implied by the word “mankind.” Fitzgerald probably hadn’t even noticed it.
“You see,” he continued, “the Race has a long history, as bloody as any human account. They now have a culture that prides itself on the ‘honor of nonconfrontation.’ Direct violence is anathema to them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think of it as ‘the hand on the knife’ syndrome. The Race’s culture puts the highest taboo, not on the knife going in the back, but on any honorable person having his hand upon it.”
“I find it hard to believe that these things are nonviolent.”
“That’s the irony. They believe they’re nonviolent. Ever since they landed on this planet their modus operandi, if you will, has been to employ politically active ‘locals’ who are instructed to carry out their agenda. It doesn’t matter if the ‘local’ is a member of parliament, a military commander, or a terrorist. If a few people die as the ‘locals’ are carrying out the alien’s agenda, the Race feels no responsibility.”
Fitzgerald leaned forward and smiled. “In fact, if people get killed, the Race simply considers it an example of our own moral degeneracy and a justification of their mission here.”
She thought the whole thing was twisted enough to be human.
Then Fitzgerald went into a catalog of what events could be traced to the Race’s interference, and what started out being ironic and twisted became truly frightening.
Fitzgerald said that it was almost certain that the Iranian terrorists that slaughtered the Saudi royal family in ’19 were backed financially by the Race. That had been the sparking incident that led to the Third Gulf War and the formation of the Islamic Axis. The fundamentalist Axis made sure that the only real technical progress the region made was in the area of warfare. Embryonic space programs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan all died on the vine.
Funds from the Race led to the rise of a rabid anti-Islam regime in India and a fascist technocracy in Japan. The rise of tensions between India and the Islamic Axis, and Japan and Socialist China broke in 2024, when the first shots in the Pan-Asian war were fired. In ’27, New Delhi was nuked. In ’35, Tokyo followed suit.
It took only a few years for the Islamic Axis to finally turn its attention to liberating Palestine. In ’41, Tel Aviv was nuked.
By the time Fitzgerald reached Tel Aviv, Evi was shaking. Forget the war itself. Forget a trail of blood that ran across two decades. Forget everything but those three cities. New Delhi, Tokyo, Tel Aviv . . .
Those three names represented the only grave markers for nine million people.
“It seems that the Pan-Asian war was so successful in keeping us earthbound that the Race is trying to foment a civil war here in the States. The Asian war left the U.S. with the only viable space program looking beyond the solar system.”
She raised her head. Images of what she had seen when she passed through Tel Aviv were still fresh in her memory. She had to pull herself out of that private horror to pay attention to what Fitzgerald was saying now.
“With one hand,” he was saying, “they try to get anti-technological, anti-moreau politicians elected. You uncovered one of those operations.”
“With the other?”
“With the other, they finance radical moreau groups. One group plays against the other, and the resulting explosion keeps people too busy to look beyond the local gravity well.”
She thought of General Wu and her military hardware. It looked like it was getting damn close to an explosion. She could only imagine what would happen if command weren’t in the hand of that cautious, serene bear but rather in the hands of a hothead like Corporal Gurgueia.
She thought of the probe that was, “even now,” Price had said, entering the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri. The whole reason the Race was here was to prevent that. That had been what triggered the shit hitting the fan.
However, it wasn’t just her. It was a national shit, and the fan was the size of a continent.
She looked at the scientist, who had seemed to shrink even as he conducted his animated discussion about the Race. She leaned toward Fitzgerald. “Did you think of the reaction you’d provoke if you launched those probes?”
“What?”
“The reason all this happened is because of those probes. It isn’t just us, or Frey’s little group. You’ve given the Race—” She snorted at the pretentious name. “—incentive to push even harder to drive this country over the edge.”
“No one anticipated that they had faster-than-light communications—”
“Except Davidson. And all that means is you would have had, what, another four years or so before the aliens here got word of the launch?”
“By then we would have—”
“What? Gone public? I doubt it. Know the Race better? I think you had what you needed to know six years ago.”
“You don’t understand—”
“I understand that for six years you sat on this. You studied it, got involved in your own political rivalries, and became enamored of your own discoveries.” She stood up and jabbed her finger into his chest. “And none of you did anything about it.”
“Frey wanted—”
“Frey was too damn paranoid. He couldn’t trust anything that wasn’t under his own control. He was so afraid of betrayal that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“The Race had bribed so many—”
“If you had gotten word to enough people in enough departments, they couldn’t have suppressed it. They aren’t omnipotent, they aren’t all-knowing—”
There was a hiss from behind her and foul air drifted in from the opening that led to the chute. A cable descended from the hole. She heard Dimitri’s voice echo above. “Time for your audience.”
There was a handle on the end of the cable.
She turned back to Fitzgerald. “Did you force yourself to believe you were doing the right thing, or did you simply ignore the question?”
She picked up the handle, and the cable drew her up the chute before she heard him respond.