Strange, Dekka thought, two young women who could not be more different, talking about Sam Temple as if he was a fragile child they had to protect. Sam and Armo came back in, laughing at some shared joke, and set sandwiches down. Armo had one halfway down his throat already. Both young men caught the mood, and Sam shot a look at his wife and then at Dekka.
“Ah. So the decision’s been made,” he said with a mixture of rueful acceptance and frustration. He shrugged. Then he held up the hands that had once had the power to blast a beam of light capable of cutting through steel. Nothing happened. “Honestly, I wouldn’t be of much use.”
Dekka said, “Right, you’re all done for, useless and pathetic.” She shook her head. “Don’t make me slap the crap out of you, Sam. I am not going to feel sorry for you, and if you feel sorry for yourself, I swear to God I will kick it right out of you.”
To Dekka’s delight and Astrid’s relief, Sam burst out laughing. “I have missed you, Dekka. You, Edilio, Lana . . . Breeze.”
Dekka felt the familiar catch in her throat on hearing that last name. Brianna, the Breeze, Dekka’s one-way, unreciprocated, hopeless, doomed, magnificent love. “We kicked more than our share of ass,” Dekka said.
Sam looked intently at his friend. “You’ve got something else to tell us, Dekka.”
“He hasn’t gotten any dumber,” Dekka said to Astrid, trying for a light tone.
“Well, he couldn’t, really,” Astrid said, playing along. It was an old joke between Astrid the Genius and Sam the surfer dude.
“Spill it,” Sam said, undeterred.
Dekka folded her hands, twining the fingers. “I don’t think it showed up on the public footage, at least not the stuff I’ve seen.”
Sam waited, and Astrid, as if sensing the need, stood up.
“Drake,” Dekka said. “Whip Hand is back.”
ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Six was not a large chunk; in fact, by the time fiery reentry had burned off a bit, it would weigh just forty pounds on impact. The impact had been carefully calculated to be in the Atlantic Ocean, four hundred nautical miles west-northwest of São Miguel Island in the Azores.
But the loose grip of astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper changed that. During a 2008 space walk, astronaut Stefanyshyn-Piper had accidentally let go of a briefcase-sized tool kit.
Because ASO-6 was smallish, it picked up a bit of a wobble when it smacked into that orbiting space garbage, and went off in a different direction than its original trajectory. It hit water thirty miles off the coast of the Kings Bay submarine base in Georgia, just north of the Florida line.
The water wasn’t deep by Atlantic Ocean standards. The rock would likely be recoverable. But the vessels intended to carry out the recovery were all about two thousand miles from the location, a trip that would take them days to complete.
In the meantime the Coast Guard cutter Abbie Burgess was dispatched to monitor the scene.
Fourteen hours later, with the undersea research flotilla steaming toward them, the Abbie Burgess sank, with the loss of twenty-one lives.
The only radio message to be heard from the Abbie Burgess was, “Oh, God! Oh, G—”
A Coast Guard helicopter sent to the scene found only a few bits of floating wreckage. And no bodies.
| 4 | | | AND COMING IN AT NUMBER ONE . . . |
BRIGADIER GENERAL GWENDOLYN DiMarco did not like the office Tom Peaks had vacated at the Ranch, the secret research and development facility in the hills east of Monterey, California. It was too bland, too office-like, too normal.
Normal. Not a word to be applied to Tom Peaks himself, who had salved his hurt feelings at being demoted by taking a large dose of the rock and turning into a massive, fire-breathing, magma-vomiting, reptilian creature who’d burned down much of the Port of Los Angeles before being dragged into the channel by an even more bizarre and dangerous creature created out of starfish DNA.
Peaks had concealed the crazy within, and perhaps, DiMarco thought, his dull, cubicle-like office was part of the disguise. She had chosen a space closer to the action, and the action at the Ranch was all underground. Anyway, she’d never been much of a sun worshipper.
Her office now was a singular structure occupying one end of the great cavern, the combination cave and excavation that hid all their work from electronic eyes on satellites and drones. On Google satellite maps, the Ranch looked like what it had once been: an older, repurposed army facility.
Should call it the Iceberg, not the Ranch, DiMarco thought, nodding with grim pleasure at what she took to be a rather clever joke. Because more of it was underwater than above. Although not water, but land, earth. Dirt. Or at least a giant hole in the dirt. So, an iceberg if you meant that . . .
Well, DiMarco knew she was not a natural wit.
Her office was a long rectangle originally built as a construction office for the contractors who had excavated and built the massive underground facility. The location had the great advantage of being up high on a granite outcropping that formed a shelf a hundred feet above the cavern floor, just twenty feet below the jagged stone roof. She’d had it totally remodeled, of course, so the old corrugated-tin cladding had been replaced by reinforced concrete eight inches thick. The small, dirty windows that had been enough for the construction supervisor had been replaced with a single long window, twenty-four feet from end to end and six feet tall. Level 8 bulletproof glass, of course, just a hair over six centimeters thick, and capable of shrugging off five rounds from a high-powered sniper rifle.
Within the Bunker—as DiMarco’s office had been instantly nicknamed—were just two interior walls. One, on the left end, closed off DiMarco’s adjutant, secretary, and security detail. On the right end DiMarco had her private bathroom. But occupying fully two-thirds of the square footage was her own office, dominated by a massive steel desk partly made of armor recovered from a Russian tank that had come to misfortune in Ukraine. The desk was painted olive drab, a very military contrast to the rest of the office, which had expensive Persian carpets and rich mahogany bookshelves stuffed with everything ever written about the Perdido Beach Anomaly and the emerging field of exobiology, and a great many books on arcane aspects of genetics and the hacking of same.
Major Mike Atwell, DiMarco’s adjutant, walked in, five long strides from his own office, stepped off with careful precision to bring him just before her desk, where he executed a pivot that faintly snapped his heels together, and lay the morning briefing book on her desk.
The paper copy was a formality, of course; DiMarco already had the digital version open on her computer.
“Have a seat, Mike,” DiMarco said.
Atwell, a thirty-one-year-old West Pointer with not one but two PhDs—genetics and military history with a focus on China—was a man who would never manage to look as good as he should in his impeccably tailored uniforms. He was getting full at the waist, had shoulders that were more vertical than horizontal, and had been cursed with a face that screamed “nerd.”
“Let’s run down the top-ten list,” DiMarco said.
Atwell nodded and began from memory. He might not have shoulders, but he had prodigious recall.
“We are well beyond ten at this point,” Atwell said, earning a sharp look from DiMarco, who hated being told what she already knew.