CHAPTER NINETEEN

LOYALTY AND LOVE

A good officer anticipates when he is going to take casualties, and this was one of those times.

“Get outa here,” he told the others. “Run like hell.” He hooked one of the Storms to his chest and shoulders and went to the middle of the road.

Pete joined him, another one on his chest.

Mark turned to him and shouted, “You got your orders, now do it!”

Bending back, Mark aimed the gun and fired it into the complexity of pipes, wires, and girders that was at this point not a hundred feet overhead.

Immediately, Pete’s weapon also ripped the air.

“Goddamnit, I told you to get the hell out of here!”

Moving with quick efficiency, the long steel neck Mark had seen from a distance came down from the thing. It moved with a snake’s graceful urgency, more like a living thing than something mechanical.

He watched it quest from place to place.

He discharged another load of beads into the thing, listening to the thunderous rip as they broke the sound barrier—but again nothing seemed to happen.

“Jesus,” Gina said, looking up.

A cloud of tiny objects gleamed and sparkled in the sunlight, and Mark realized with sickening horror that it was the beads. They had been frozen in midflight.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “They’ve got gravity solved.”

A roar from beside him made him turn, and he saw that Pete was still there, operating his gun. He had just fired at the steel neck, which was now swaying, perhaps meaning that damage had been done. So Mark fired at it, too, but the swaying continued, and he realized the truth: The thing wasn’t taking damage, it was aiming.

“Get off the road!” he shouted as he rolled onto the shoulder, then scrambled back into the woods. Gina and Linda came with him, but Pete was not fast enough.

He threw off the gun and jumped, but he never hit the ground. Instead, he shot into the air and Mark hated to see him kicking and clutching, hated to hear him scream like a boy as he came dropping back down from a thousand feet. He bounced and was still.

This was just too much, it was too horrific, and for the first time in Mark’s life, he considered surrender. But what would that gain? A slow death, or worse, enslavement to the part of himself that he despised.

Gina said quietly, “Mark?”

She was looking toward the road, where Linda was working frantically, attempting to attach Pete’s Storm to her chest. Before Mark could run to her, she was upended and dragged into the sky. The gun fell, shattering against the roof of the pickup.

Her screams pealed and pealed, echoing flatly in the silence of the forest. The helplessness was miserable, but with it came a stirring of the same shaming thrill that had almost overwhelmed him in the Glade. Beside him, he could hear Gina gasping, and he did not know if it was fear or anger, or the shame of pleasure.

He did not let her see what was left when Linda’s voice dropped to a growl and died, the red skeleton dangling in midair like a grotesque Halloween decoration.

He drew Gina deeper into the woods.

“Where are we going?” she asked, trying to pull away from him.

“We need concealment.”

“Yes, of course. I understand. It’s just the two of us now.”

He stopped. Hidden here in the thick forest, they were safe from the menace from above, but for how long?

“You know what we are and why we’re here, Gina. It’s time to work as a team.”

She yanked her arm away. “We can’t fight them! There’s no way!”

“We have to fight.”

“With what? Knives?”

“For us, they’re better than guns.”

“Oh, come on!” Anger replaced her sobs.

“Gina, we have all sorts of capabilities programmed into us.”

“What are they?”

“What I’m finding is, if they’re needed, they’re there.”

“What are they, damnit? You can’t use something you don’t know you have.”

“You’ve been in flicker.”

“When that hybrid slowed down?”

“You sped up. He could have followed you but he wasn’t expecting it and you were able to drop him. That’s the why of knives instead of guns. In flicker, you can thrust a knife faster than a gun—any gun—can fire.”

“I’m a satellite surveillance specialist. It’s technical work, and that’s what I know.”

“Gina, you need to come into contact with more of yourself. And there’s a lot more, believe me. We are weapons, Gina, powerful, living weapons.”

She stepped away from him. “Here we are in this bizarre, bizarre situation, desperate, and that’s all you have to offer?”

“You know something of your power, Gina. I know you do, I can see it in your eyes. The fear that it brings.”

A shadow passed over them, bringing sudden darkness to the forest. They both looked up and saw that the great collection of girders that defined the huge ship was just above them. As he looked up into the thing, an electricity shuddered deep in Mark’s body, bringing with it a new desire, deep and sick and ugly.

Always before, his work had remained separate from his emotional life. No more.

He needed Gina, and he needed her right now. “No matter what you believe, you can fight and you will fight.”

“I have no idea how.”

He grabbed her arm, shook her like a rag. “We come to our powers as needed. That’s the way it works. I don’t know why, but that’s what I’m finding. Trust yourself. There are parts of you that you don’t know exist. The way of the warrior is programmed into you, and now we have to do this!”

“And what happens when we reach the limits of our abilities? Then what?”

“In the woods, you were touched with a disk. Probably very quickly.”

For an instant, she glanced away, telling him that he was precisely correct.

“Then it or one like it was given to you, and you’re supposed to touch me with it.”

“No.”

“Gina, I’m remembering a lot of things. Memories that they thought were erased, but the brain is a labyrinth. There are a lot of hiding places, and I remember these disks and how they’re used, so where is it, Gina?”

Purple light began glimmering down from above, seeking along the trunks of the trees, glimmering on the ferns, making their long leaves tremble and bend upward into its sucking death.

“You tell me now, or you turn away from me now, and if you do, it’s forever.”

She would not look at him.

“We just found each other. Don’t take this from us. We’re two. That’s it. Nobody else like us. All we’ll ever have is us, Gina.”

She gasped, gasped more deeply.

“I—I—can’t. I can’t make myself, Mark. I want to but I can’t!”

He sought into her eyes with his own. “You can, Gina. Part of you can. Because you’re not all machine. You’re not, or I could not love you and I do love you. I love you, Gina. And I think you love me, and that part of you can give the thing up.”

She thrust her hand into the pocket. He stiffened his muscles. She was as fast as he was.

He let her draw out her hand. She—and his heart—would either survive the next second, or they would die together.

She raised her closed fist. He stood absolutely still.

Her whole body trembled. Then her free hand came out, came up, her fingers extended, and he felt the cool of her touch on his cheek and saw into her eyes deeper than he had ever seen into any eyes.

Her other hand opened. The disk lay there, gleaming softly, a simple shape for what was probably the most advanced piece of technology in the world.

He took it from her and closed his own hand around it. A pulsating, vibrating energy was there. He tightened his grip. It was hard, but not that hard, and as he continued to crush it, he felt in his heart a growing sense of freedom.

They were so vulnerable—he was vulnerable—and it felt wonderful to destroy at least a small part of that vulnerability.

It is a terrible thing to live in a dictatorship, but worse by far to have a soul that can become the possession of others.

A flash of heat and white light came from between his fingers, and when he opened his hand, he found a dense rubble of electronics and organic material, and blood.

She took his hand in hers. “You’re bleeding.”

“No.” He threw the rubble to the ground. “It is.” He shook his head. “Everything they make is biomechanical. You and I are human—mostly. I hope. But the rest of these things are just a mix of, I don’t know—human, animal, machine. Alien, too, I assume.” He looked down at the mess he’d thrown to the ground. “That device was alive. It’s a whole different level of technology, where life and machine have become one and the same.”

“I feel like we’re doing evil. You’ve done evil by hurting it. I did evil by letting you.”

“That’s the exact opposite of the truth.”

“I know it but that’s not how I feel.”

He would need to remain wary. She was fighting the programming, but she might lose. Only time would tell. He hated it that she was dangerous, but he denied that truth at his peril.

The purple light came again, and where it touched them, their bodies grew lighter. They pulled themselves away from its glow.

“They know,” she said. “They were waiting to see my choice, and now they know.”

“We would have been very useful to them. Now we have to die.”

He looked up into the bright purple eye, which was speeding down, straight at them. Nearby, drumming started and immediately grew loud, then deafening.

“We have to get inside its defenses,” Mark shouted over the roar. “We’re going to board it.”

“Ride up in that light? It’ll drop us.”

“We’re going up on our own. We’re going to jump.”

“It’s a hundred feet! More!”

He grabbed her arm and jumped directly upward. Her weight jolted him and caused her to cry out as they sped up through the tall cathedral of trees and into the bright, full sun. As they closed with the bulk of the object, he looked up into it. The thing was fifty feet above them, then thirty feet, then ten, then he reached out with his free hand, extended his fingers, and touched it. He grasped, but their weight had overcome the power of the jump, and there was nothing to hold except the vibrating edge of one of the great paddles that jutted out from the central ring of the thing.

He slid away, dropping toward the treetops again, then crashing through them, boughs breaking under him as he slid in a shower of leaves to the ground.

She tumbled in a heap beside him, coughed, gagged, then wobbled to her feet.

“What—what—my God.” She stared at him. “My God, how did we do that?”

“Just be glad we can.”

The light shone on him. He felt himself rising, and this time helplessly. Once his feet left the ground, he was lost.

The drumming was closing in. He could see hundreds of hybrids in among the trees.

As he began rising, he made a decision and took her wrist again. Her eyes widened, she screamed, she struggled, but then she grabbed his hand and hung on as the world swept away beneath them.

Her face, twisted by fear, pleaded with him. “It’s going to drop us, Mark, oh, God, help me.”

“You’re not like them, you’re going to survive this.”

The light went out and the air screamed and Gina screamed and the forest came rushing up at them, and Mark felt the possibility of slowing and held her to him with all his strength, and they did slow, the wind ceased to scream, and then they hung clinging together like two frightened children, and there was birdsong in the treetops five feet below them, and from the depths, the eager drumming.

“Mark … Mark…”

“You have these abilities, Gina, just like me.”

He writhed in the air, trying to somehow make himself move upward, but there was no place to start, nothing to push against.

“We have to go down to the ground,” he said, “and they’re going to be waiting, so we have to be fast. The second you touch down, crouch and jump with all your might, and you will come up again, and you grab on to it and get onto it.”

They came down through the giving crowns of the great redwoods and settled toward a raging, stomping mob of hybrids.

“Use your knife,” he said, and in another instant they were on the ground and fighting back to back, and he could hear from her fury that she was expending all the effort she could bring to bear. They carved a space of a few feet around themselves.

“Now!”

Together they sprang upward and the air raced past and the great trunks of the trees, then the higher limbs, and then they were in the sky and she was crying out in terror and wild joy, because it was an incredible, wonderful power, it was like becoming a creature of heaven.

The projection snaked wildly in the sky, seeking them with its baleful eye, and for an instant the light touched Gina and she was thrown head over heels.

“Gina!”

Scrambling in the air, she fought her way out of it and upward again, clawing, running, grasping for any edge of the thing, and then she was hanging on it—and he flew past her.

He’d pushed too hard, and now, as he tumbled upward, the object whirled away beneath him. He twisted his body and attempted to head down in a controlled manner, but wind blasted into his face and he rushed straight into the yawning ring.

It was racing past when he felt a sudden fearsome tug—and then he was hanging over the trees, the huge edge of the ring sweeping around on both sides of him. For a moment, he remained still. He was unsure why he had stopped. He was hanging from something.

“You’re really heavy,” Gina’s strained voice said.

She was gripping him by the collar of his uniform. He pulled himself up and over the edge of the ring and into the object itself. He fumbled to a squatting position.

“That was my life that time, Gina. You saved my life.”

She looked at him out of stricken, tearing eyes, then went off, climbing quickly and with surprising agility. He climbed after her, but she was incredibly fast, incredibly balanced.

“Gina!”

She had disappeared into the complicated structure.

Then he saw her again, high in the structure, leaping like an acrobat from one catwalk to another.

He wondered if the two of them might be alone on the thing. Did it have a pilot? Crew?

As he clambered up after her, he noticed that the structure had a strange softness to it, a little give and even a little warmth wherever he placed a hand.

No doubt it was also, in some way, alive. Maybe it had no crew because it didn’t need one. A living machine would be its own crew.

Gina was watching him now, no longer climbing. He drew himself upward hand over hand. All around him, the thing hummed and whirred and sighed.

Her eyes were inscrutable pools, set in the silk-smoothness of her face.

He said, “We’ve penetrated its defenses or we’d be dead. So let’s see if we can figure out how to destroy it.”

“I know it,” she said. “I know lots about it.”

“How?”

She headed off around the catwalk. The forest was now far below them. The machine was gaining altitude.

She raced up a narrow ladder, moving toward what he thought might be some sort of control room, a dark, box-shaped form high in the superstructure.

He watched this beloved, deceitful creature, his Gina, climbing with the urgency of a hounded animal. She was far from the self-possessed, supremely competent young woman who had been his controller. This Gina was a true soldier, desperate, terrified, but not stopping.

Looking down from the catwalk, he could see through the open central ring of the structure and all the way to the ground, and the diminishing scale of everything told him that they must have reached an altitude of at least twelve thousand feet. There was no sense of movement, no shaking, just a slight breeze coming through the empty central opening of the thing. The higher they went, the colder it got.

Rather than race after Gina, he continued to evaluate the situation. He raised his eyes to the thing’s soaring crown of antennae. Perhaps they had something to do with how it stayed aloft.

So maybe he could break them off. Maybe that would make a difference. Getting to them, though, would be difficult. He’d be vulnerable, too, especially while he was climbing along that upper ring. It was narrow, so he’d have to balance carefully. Plus, they were probably too well anchored to damage with bare hands. And what if they carried an electrical charge?

He began ascending a spiral catwalk. Many years ago, he’d been on assignment in Rome, and he thought that the monstrous ring that he was circling was about twice the diameter of the dome of St. Peter’s. So, about 350 feet in diameter. To his eye, that would make the distance from the tip of the downward-pointing projection to the crown of the upper antenna about seven hundred feet, roughly twice the length of a football field.

He climbed higher, stopping occasionally to judge perspective. He disciplined himself to remain calm, to evaluate. Outwardly, a large man walked swiftly but easily along the catwalk. Inwardly, he seethed, wanting to trust Gina, but still unsure.

A distant flash of sunlight caught his eye and he leaned over the catwalk, looking down. Far below, a flight of jets, silver in the sun, went to afterburner and began to ascend toward them. Immediately, their speed increased, causing the whole complicated rig to shake. The soft movement of air rose until it was a wind screaming through the girders, tearing at the catwalk, quickly growing so powerful that it forced Mark to clutch the flimsy railing. It was coming from below, meaning the whole ungainly mechanism was speeding toward the jets.

In seconds, he could see details on the F-16s, markings, rivets, the dark glass of the pilots’ face masks.

With a shrieking roar, something bright shot up into the center of the great open ring.

It was a missile, but when it stopped, the fire of its engine did not fade, the shriek did not stop. Holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare, he saw the midfuselage wings and white nose of an AIM-type missile, a large one. Its engine still running, it simply hung there in midair.

Others followed it, three, four, five stars in the bright daylight. One after another, they all stopped, and one by one, their engines burned out. The jets, wheeling in tight turns a few hundred feet below the craft, shimmered as if they were underwater. Then their fuselages seemed to turn to liquid and spray off behind the airframes, leaving the structural components naked to the wind. The jets disintegrated into fluttering bits of metal and red haze that had been the pilots.

The six silver missiles the drone had captured seemed one by one to turn to water and drip away toward the ground. But their warheads did not turn to water, they remained hanging in the air, black, gleaming spheres.

Mark recognized them for what they were: nuclear warheads. So the missiles had been nuclear-tipped AIM-120s—Slammers—among the most powerful weapons on earth.

He did not often feel fear, but he felt it now, not because he was afraid of the missiles, but because of two other fears. The first was what the presence of nuclear weapons told him: The White House was absolutely desperate. What a horrible struggle the president must have had, to make the decision that had led to this attack. He would have sweated blood, knowing the damage that these weapons would cause on the ground, yet he had sent six of them against the machine.

Useless effort.

The second fear was even greater. The warheads could have been destroyed along with the planes, the pilots, and the missiles. But they had been captured instead. This meant only one thing to him: Somehow, at some point in this battle, they would be used.

Far below, Mark could see the unmistakable outline of San Francisco Bay. They had risen high and gone north, too, returning to the Bay Area.

Once again, he began to climb. The effort the air force was making spurred him on. If they were trying this hard, risking the use of nuclear weapons, his assessment was that they had drawn the same conclusion he had: This strange machine was damned important, and well worth the effort necessary to destroy it.

He reached Gina. “You climb well.”

“Those are nukes,” she responded. “Captured now.”

He looked toward the bombs, dark spheres about twice the size of basketballs. They were high-blast-effect, low-yield plutonium bombs.

“We need to gain control of them.”

“Can we get to them?”

“I don’t see how.”

Below them, the clouds were becoming more defined, and Mark saw something in them, a fast-moving shape. Then, rising into the clear was an unexpected sight: a press helicopter, its red-and-white livery gleaming in the sun. It was insane, but so heroic and so human.

The snakelike projection slid out, aiming toward the chopper.

Where he and Gina were, the tower of antennae hummed loud and high, a sound he could feel in his chest. The sense of increasing power made him wary.

The chopper got closer. As the purple light played along the rotors, material began flying off them in chunks, then in streams.

“We need to help them,” Gina screamed.

The projection was rigid now, its light flooding the chopper. A door slid open and a man, smoke pouring off his body, could be seen writhing, preparing to jump out.

“Mark, it’s burning them to death, we’ve got to do what we can!”

“Which is nothing!”

As the man became a torch, Gina sweated, her eyes following him as he went sailing downward, arms grabbing air, legs kicking. His smoke trail disappeared into the clouds.

She watched the struggling chopper. The metal snake undulated, painting it with the light, and Mark realized that it wasn’t simply destroying the chopper, it was torturing the inhabitants, purposefully prolonging their agony.

Unwanted images from the Glade swarmed in his mind, and he felt the lust for human suffering returning to his heart. He fought it, though, and he knew how to fight it, by bringing to mind the thought of how the pain must feel to the victims.

Hair and back ablaze, another man dove out of the chopper. Smoke gushed from the doors, both now open.

They were following it down, the snake remaining a few feet from it, and he knew that it was probing individual crewmen, touching its fire to their bodies.

Somebody came out onto one of the runners, a young man in a smoking T-shirt, his hair flying. Bracing himself as best he could, he aimed a video camera at the huge ship above him. As he shot his image, the light from the snake danced on him, and he screamed, his cries small in the vastness of the sky.

Gina’s gaze became even more fixed, her lips hanging open in a parody of sensuality.

The man’s skin began to slough off, swept away in chunks by the wash of the still-turning rotor.

“Gina, I feel just like you do. We can’t help it but we don’t need to give in, Gina. We have to find the controls, that’s how to put a stop to this.”

“But what happens then? What if there are ten of this thing? A thousand? And more weapons, and more hybrids?”

“Rule of the infantryman: Keep putting one foot in front of the other and stay alive.”

The chopper nosed over and tumbled away, the fourth body sailing gracefully beside it, until the clouds closed around them and they were gone.

Gina watched, her eyes wide, her face covered with sweat. Then she turned away, and he saw the anguish and the disgust.

“You loved it, and you hate yourself for it. Same as me.”

She sucked air through bared teeth. “Why does it feel so damn good to watch them die?”

“The machine part of us despises man and finds human suffering delicious. We have to keep our emotions focused on our humanity.”

Her devastated eyes regarded him. Around them the huge device shuddered, moving fast now.

“The controls are here,” she said. “That’s why I came here.”

“How did you know?”

“I was taught something about this machine. In a school in San Francisco. I don’t know the name of the school and I don’t know when I was there, but as soon as I saw this thing, I knew how it worked.” She drew back a black panel, revealing a cell like the ones in the tunnels. In it was a sleek hybrid body, which Mark immediately hauled out, with a wet sound. Its pale skin shimmered, then flushed red in the sunlight. The body, as big as he was, writhed in his arms until he threw it off the catwalk. It arced out, its hands grasping, its legs pumping, then dropped down toward the clouds, kicking and clawing as it fell away, its voice a fading series of cries.

The interior of the cell was wet and red, its surface mottled with golden specks that he knew were leads that would link the pilot’s nervous system with the machine.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said.

“I have to think about it!”

He peered into the dim, confined space.

“Mark, without him, it’ll crash. So let’s just get off it before that happens.”

“I have to try.”

“Mark, no!”

He pulled himself into the interior. It was like being in an MRI scanner made of dense paper, but even more confining.

It was pitch-dark here, and totally silent—and then it wasn’t. He was not only here, he was inside the whole hybrid mass everywhere that it was, and he was miserable and sweating and hungry and packed with hate, such hate as he had never known, raw, essential, darker than dark.

He forgot himself, he forgot Gina, the mystery of their pasts, the anguish of being something programmed, he forgot it all as his consciousness raced through the gridwork and into the antennae of the drone, and he heard Gina’s distant voice, young and strong shouting, “Mark, don’t let it take you, don’t let it,” and strove against it, but his consciousness kept dwindling. He dragged his mind away from the collective mind of the hybrids, and as deep as he could into the fortress of his throbbing body … and then into—

A classroom. Outside, a city hums. There’s the unmistakable clang of a cable car. He and Gina are together. They’re the only students. The blackboard is dense with equations, and he feels the nostalgia of deep loss.

Somewhere, sometime, they had been kids together.

But when had this happened? He’d only been with Gina once … hadn’t he?

“Mark! Mark!”

Yes! I’m here. And I have it, I feel it as I feel my own bones and muscles and nerves. I am this thing, this machine.

Just now, he could will it to do his bidding. And he did will it. He willed it to go down, to race down, to go faster and faster.

Blinding light. Hurting. Then a voice: “Jump! Now!”

Out of this perfect balance? Never.

Coals fell past him, and he watched their graceful, arcing movement as they dropped through the dark of his mind.

“We can’t stay here, Mark, we have to go!”

Harsh wind hit him, and he knew that he had to lift himself out or fall with this thing.

She pulled at him, then she was gone, her face terrible as she fell away—and he saw that the whole thing was disintegrating around them, that the great panels were drooping and falling, that the antennae were becoming long, writhing strands that flailed away in the air, and press helicopters and jets were maneuvering desperately to escape the great, collapsing ruin.

His body was filled with a deep and delightful warmth that spread from the places where the golden nodes in the walls still connected to his nervous system. He understood that he was still plugged in, and his enemy was trying to capture him with pleasure, so he would fall with the machine.

It had all been another deception. He’d been meant to get into this cell. He’d been lured.

So was she still the slave of her program? Had she cleverly tricked him?

He twisted, he pulled at himself, but it was no use—until Gina returned, incredibly, impossibly falling and flying back down into the crashing ruin, ripping aside debris as she came.

Her hands grasped his uniform shirt, and there was a noise now, a roar of dismay so intense that it might have come from the throat of Satan himself, and Mark was also falling, and she was clutching him, the ground rushing up at them.

He knew they had to face into the fall. He knew they had only seconds. Now it was his turn to help her, and he grabbed at her, missing because she was going feet first and thus with less wind resistance. Using his abdominal muscles, he forced his legs out behind him. Then he stretched his arms, making himself into an arrow pointing downward, and slid toward her, gaining distance slowly as, below her, the ground spun, a green haze.

He reached her, felt her warm skin, drew her to him, grabbing a shoulder, an arm, turning her, then laying an arm around her shoulder so that they fell together.

She understood the machine—the drone—but he understood the sky and he worked his will on it, and the rushing air ceased to rush, and they were dropping toward a bright cloud, and he could smell the exhaust of one of the helicopters as they sank into the gray, swirling silence.

By the time they emerged, he had controlled their fall. How, he was not quite sure, but it felt right, that was all. It was a sense of harmony with earth and air, something he had been well aware of before, but never felt with this clarity and certainty.

The wind declined as they dropped, and her eyes, which had been red with terror, now began to clear and sparkle, and he saw something like wonder come into them.

“Are we flying?” Her voice was snapped away by the wind.

“We’re falling very, very well.”

Then he knew, if he turned himself, he could do something—and he did it, he faced directly toward the ground and began to speed, her shouts of alarm tearing away behind him. Closer he went, closer yet, until he could see treetops and then a splash of gray roofs, then he spread his arms and threw his head back, and a great, howling whoosh took him upward again. Faster and faster yet he rose, until the fleck of a cloud above him became an enormous mass, and he flew through it in an instant and was still rising.

The vastness of the Pacific lay before him, stretching to the blue edge of the sky. On it, he could see a container ship followed by its white wake, steaming toward San Francisco, still oblivious to the trouble there.

Treetops flashed past below them, and a flash of green, then they were crashing down through the boughs into a forest glade.

He hit so hard that his teeth snapped and his legs stung from the impact. He rolled away as much of the energy of the fall as he could, then came to his feet in tall, yellow grass. A moment later, he saw her as she, also, rose up.

She looked down at herself, then up at him. They came together, embracing, and he was glad because he thought that she had made a choice, and it was him.

The fog was so heavy that they couldn’t see but fifty feet. It came in rolling, gentle waves that brought with them a muffling silence. Not far away, there floated something magical, an onion dome, pale in the soft light, appearing and disappearing as billows of fog first revealed it, then hid it again in gray.

It was all so strange, so very alien in its silence, so exotic, that Mark thought they might somehow have slipped into another reality altogether, or perhaps another time. At this point, as far as he was concerned, anything was possible, anything at all.

“God knows where we are,” he muttered.

Gina walked toward the dome, moving faster as she got closer. Black tendrils began spinning down around her, all that was left of the disintegrated machine. Rather than let it fall into human hands, it had been destroyed.

Just as she was about to disappear into the fog, she turned and gestured to him.

He joined her at a trot. “What is it?”

She moved a few steps closer. Then a few more.

More hesitant, he followed. “Careful, Gina.”

It loomed now, the white structure in the fog, as alien a place as he had ever seen. More tendrils swept from the sky and were blown in eddies with the fog.

But what was this place?

She walked up to it, hesitated for a moment—and then, to his horror, went inside.

He drew his knife from the deep side pocket where it was stored and clipped the scabbard to his belt.

He entered a dim space, warm and humid. Before him loomed an enormous plant laden with fleshy red flowers and drooping, dark green leaves. He thought, I’m face-to-face with a living creature from another world.

Perhaps they had been projected by some unimaginable power associated with the drone to a planet across the galaxy. As he reached out to touch the leaves, though, he noticed a vaguely familiar object along a path off to his right, facing away from him. Dark blue and wheeled, it had handles that indicated that it was designed to be pushed.

“Gina?”

There was no reaction. He moved closer to the small vehicle. As he looked down at it, the sense of familiarity increased. He leaned over and saw something with smooth, pink skin. It was covered deep in blankets, and he knew immediately what it was. With a trembling hand, he reached down and touched the soft face of the baby that was sleeping in the stroller.

Then something was on his back, a light, lithe form grabbing his face from behind and shrieking like a cat set on fire. Lurching back to avoid upending the stroller, he plunged into the huge plant in an attempt to shake off what he thought was a cat.

“It’s okay,” Gina’s voice shouted, “he’s okay!”

The claws drew away from his face. The body jumped down off him. He turned around to find a woman glaring at him. She was small, her hair dark. She wore a soiled pink housecoat and wet, devastated bunny slippers, the little fur noses all black and dismal.

Gina said, “This is Mark Bryan. He’s a soldier, too. We’re here to help.”

“All the soldiers are dead,” the woman murmured.

Mark looked to Gina. Obviously, they weren’t on another planet, and she knew perfectly well where they were.

“Are you familiar with this place?”

“This is the Flower Conservatory,” she replied. “We’re in Golden Gate Park.”

So they were still in the fight—but not completely, not without the rest of the unit. His responsibility.

He thought at once of the bombs. When the drone was directly above the city—when it had disintegrated—they had still been in it. So where were they now?

But for the dripping water, the place was silent—except for the breathing, which was everywhere. He could distinguish the slow breathing of adults, the struggling breath of the injured, the faster breath of children.

“There are people all around us,” he said softly.

“I know it.”

From outside, in the distance but becoming more distinct, he heard a low rumble of wild and syncopated drums.

“Okay, folks,” he said aloud. “We’re here to help you and I don’t think we have a lot of time. You need to show yourselves.”

A man came out of a dense planting. He wore muddy pajamas. He was hand in hand with a girl of perhaps ten.

In moments, a crowd had appeared, dozens of people, all staring with fixed, terrified eyes.

Mark looked back at them, seeking for some words, something to say that would encourage them.

There was nothing.