Reid Farmer stared in disbelief as Chief Raven danced and dodged. He’d never seen a knife fight. The pistol lay forgotten in his hand.
“Go!” Savage rasped where he lay on the floor. “You heard her. Go break that damn machine.”
“I can’t leave you to—”
“You’re all that’s left,” Savage said weakly. “Go . . .”
Reid staggered to his feet and yanked the door open. A woman was standing right in front of him, her eyes wide in surprise.
She was tall, long gray hair worn in a ponytail. Reid placed her in her fifties, but still attractive, with intelligent blue eyes.
He poked the pistol at her, saying, “Step back!”
And she did, hands rising in surrender.
Reid let the door close behind him, aware that two more men shot up from movie chairs off to his left.
“Who the hell are you?” asked the tall one with the droopy face.
Reid backed up to the wall. “All of you, down the stairs by the machine.”
“I don’t think so. Mr. . . . ?” The bald, potato-headed one said in a mocking tone. He looked disgustedly at Reid through dorky black-framed glasses.
“Farmer, Reid Farmer.”
“Ah, the archaeologist.” The hound-dog–faced man smiled and started forward, hand extended for the gun. “I’m your employer. Give me that. That fact that you’ve made it this far indicates that you’re worth a great deal more than we’ve been paying you to . . .”
The guy who had me tortured. Reid swallowed hard, dropped his finger down, and squeezed the trigger. Savage was right, it felt perfectly natural.
The .45 slug took the hound-dog–faced man squarely in the chest, his jowls flapping at the impact. He collapsed like a string-cut doll.
Potato-head and the woman stood paralyzed, eyes wide in shocked disbelief.
In the silence Reid said, “Move! Down onto the floor beside the machine.” He took in the man sitting at the computer station to his right. The guy’s mouth hung open, expression one of total dismay. “You, too.”
And there, watching him through a controlled gaze, sat Domina. Her station was at a raised console just this side of a giant mechanical sphere that rested on an aluminum platform.
“Everybody down in front!” Reid ordered, a part of his brain gibbering over the fact that he’d just shot a man down in cold blood.
“Dr. Farmer?” the tall woman said anxiously. “You’re making a mistake.”
“I know you,” Reid said, glancing to the side as the man in the control station carefully eased his way down onto the concrete beside the machine. “Or your voice anyway.”
“That’s right,” she said calmly. “I’m Maxine Kaplan. I was talking to you from JPL in California. I helped keep you alive as you opened Fluvium’s tomb.”
Reid slowly followed them down, keeping his distance.
“Whatever you want,” Potato-head said softly, “I can arrange it.”
“Who are you?”
“Tanner Jackson, Chief Operating Officer.” He smiled in satisfaction. “Think of me as the right hand of God.”
“Then I hope to hell that God’s left-handed.”
Tanner’s smile went flat, his eyes growing cold and dangerous. “Last chance, Dr. Farmer. Do you want the easy way out? A nice retirement? Life of leisure? Perhaps your own island in the Caribbean?”
Reid shifted his position so he could take in Gray, Domina, whatever she was called. “You really think you had a chance against that woman? She’s played you. You built her machine. And let me guess, she’s the one who did all the programming. She’s the one who knows the intricacies of how it works.”
The tech from the control panel shifted uneasily, glancing sidelong at Kaplan with a look that said, “I told you so.”
Reid turned, calling, “Hello, Domina. Why don’t you step down and join the rest now?”
She continued to regard him with a glacial-blue stare, her expression hinting at annoyance. “You are too late, Professor. What they’ve done is sufficient.”
“What do you mean, sufficient?” Kaplan asked.
“Maxine,” the engineer warned, “she’s still up there.”
To Reid, Kaplan said, “Let us shut the generator down, and we’ll all work this out.”
Reid chuckled, a feeling of insane irritation filling him. He stepped to the side, trying to keep them covered, calling, “Climb down from there, Domina. Right now. Or, I swear I’ll shoot you in the head myself.”
“God, no!” Tanner cried stepping forward. “She’s worth a fortune, you idiot!”
“Nequam populi, inanus orbis!” Reid cried. “‘Worthless people, worthless world.’ We’re fucking meaningless to her. An experimental population!”
Domina uttered a word. Some sort of holographic display projected above a black box on the woman’s console. She uttered a single unintelligible command, and Reid felt his hair began to prickle. A humming built in the air around him.
“Oh, shit!” Kaplan cried.
Reid shook his head, feeling prickles of energy running through him. Had to be that damn go pill. He turned, ordering, “Domina, get your ass out of that chair. Now.”
He saw the woman smile indulgently, watched her hand move on the control board.
“You bitch!” He jerked the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand. Kaplan and the tech threw themselves down, crawling for the stairs.
Missed.
Domina was grinning at him as he fired again.
Got to save Kilgore! Save the world.
His skin had begun to jump and wiggle. Reid steadied the pistol with both hands.
“Valete,” he said in Latin. “Goodbye.”
Even as the pistol fired, a scream caught in the bottom of his throat. Like a burst of light, his consciousness exploded.