We took the Jeep up North Base Road. As we neared North Base, its three hangars grew out of the desert. They were gorgeous, shaped like cylinders with rounded roofs, each painted a different background color: blue, green, yellow. Their most striking feature, though, was the murals on them, colorful scenes of aircraft soaring through the sky.
“Hey.” Joshua was staring at the hangars. “Cool.”
“Your air force makes pictures on hangars?” Althor asked. “Why not?” Daniel said.
“Never seen it,” Althor said.
We parked near an office building. Across the lot, a walkthrough security check broke the expanse of a chain link fence. We headed for the checkpoint, wind ruffling our hair. Heather sneezed and blew her nose.
Daniel went first at the security check, holding up his badge.
The milcop took it, looked at the picture, looked at Daniel, and nodded for him to go past.
I stepped up and held up my badge. After the guard checked it, he considered me. “How long have you worked at MIT?” Stay calm, I told myself. “Three years.”
“What’s a byte?” he asked.
I heard it as “bite.” I concentrated on him, trying to guess why he would ask such a strange question. All I could pick up was that he didn’t think I looked like a computer whiz.
“It’s part of a computer,” I guessed.
He waved me past and let the others by with a badge check and a nod. Then we were through, and staring around at North Base. It didn’t look like much, a few buildings baking under the sun. The lake bed stretched out beyond it, parched dry.
Daniel glanced at me. “You’re lucky that guy didn’t know much about computers.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“A byte isn’t part of a computer. It’s eight bits. Eight ones and zeros.”
“She convinced him,” Joshua said. “That’s what matters.” Althor looked around as we walked. Milcops in berets and green camouflage uniforms patrolled the area with dogs. Squat vehicles rumbled by, each one like a cross between a small tank and an all-terrain cockroach. “They have a lot of security,” he said.
“The ThreatCon is probably Charlie,” Daniel said.
Althor looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“ThreatCons are for possible terrorist aggression. Alpha is situation normal. Bravo is the next step, then Charlie. Delta would be a full base lockdown.” Daniel grimaced. “If you get your plane, you can bet this place will go to Delta.”
Heather was going through the papers they had given us in the trailer. “We’re supposed to go to a security briefing No, wait. That’s this afternoon. Right now we see our contact. Dr. Robert L. Forward.”
“Hey,” Joshua said. “He won the Goddard Prize in 1981.”
“Goddard Prize?” Althor asked. “What is this?”
“An award in rocket science. He got it for work on antimatter propulsion.”
“If they’ve already discovered the Jag uses antimatter propulsion,” Althor said, “they may realize it has interstellar capability.”
“Does that matter?” Heather asked.
“Sooner or later they will realize I’m here without a mothership.” He grimaced. “I’d rather they thought someone was looking for me.”
We came around the corner of a building, into view of the hangars. Up close they were even more impressive, murals drawn in bold detail, showing fighters soaring in cloud-streamered skies, above lush countryside or desert landscapes. The yellow and green hangars were closed. Blue was open, but a canvas hung in its doorways weighted to keep wind from blowing it around. A fence surrounded the structure, with a guard booth and gate where it met the hangar. Scaffolding supported by cement dividers towered next to the hangar.
“That’s odd.” Heather indicated the milcops with dogs patrolling inside the fenced area. “They have no guns.”
“It’s a precaution,” Althor said. “They don’t know what happens if bullets hit the ship.”
“You sure it’s not going to blow?” Heather asked.
Althor exhaled. “No.”
Then it happened. As someone left the hangar, a gust of wind grabbed the canvas and flipped it into the air—revealing the beauty inside. The Jag looked like an alabaster sculpture, its hull a blaze of white in the sunlight slanting into the hangar. Its lines were so clean, it seemed ready to leap off the ground and soar into the air by itself.
The canvas fell back in place.
Heather whisded. “That’s something.” Daniel and Joshua’s faces mirrored her reaction.
“Is so close,” Althor said. “If I could just reach it.”
Two milcops waited at the hangar security check, a man and a stocky woman, both armed with handguns. We showed our badges again, Daniel first. The woman nodded him through and he went to the gate, waiting for us. As the man turned to Heather, the woman checked my badge. I stood as still as possible, trying to look innocuous.
She nodded. “Go on.”
The man was checking Althor’s badge. He seemed to take forever, peering at the picture, then at Althor. As the woman let Joshua by, I went to the gate and waited with Heather and Daniel, trying to relax.
Finally the man passed Althor through. Daniel took out his copy of the key-card they had given us at the trailer and turned to the gate. A box that resembled a telephone keypad hung on it. While the milcops watched, Daniel swiped his card through the slot on the box and typed his code into the keypad. He pushed on the gate and we waited, hot desert wind fluttering our hair.
Waiting.
Daniel muttered under his breath. “Must have made a mistake.”
Heather spoke in a low voice. “Try again, I think you get three times before an alarm goes off.”
Daniel swiped his card and entered the numbers again. This time when he pushed, the gate opened.
In. We were in. Althor’s face showed no reaction. But his.heart jumped so hard it registered on my senses like the clang of a mallet on a gong.
As we headed for the hangar, a call came from the milcops behind us. “Wait there.”
We all froze. Heather turned, somehow managing to look casual. “Yes?”
Both milcops came over. The man spoke. “Don’t forget to change into the white coveralls before you enter the craft. You’ll find them in the locker inside.” He paused, studying Althor. “Sterile environment, you know.”
Althor .nodded." “Of course.”
“Well, then.” He considered us. “Go on ahead.”
As we turned back toward the ship, relief poured over me. A few more moments and we would have what we came—
“Wait,” the woman said. When we turned, she was frowning at Althor. “What’s on your face?”
“My face?” he asked.
“There.” She pointed to where sweat sheened his temples and soaked into his hair. “That. It looks like makeup.”
“It’s lotion,” Heather said. “He has poison ivy.”
The woman continued to watch Althor. “I don’t see any rash.”
“It’s covered,” he said.
Reaching up, she rubbed his temple. Her fingers came away smeared with foundation—and a gold streak showed bn his face.
I felt the milcop’s explosion of recognition. I doubt she recognized him from the sketch on the news; it strained credibility that she would associate a leather-clad tough with a bearded, blue-suited scientist. More likely, milcops assigned to the ship were given descriptions of Althor, complete with the oddities, including his gold skin.
She grabbed for her gun, but Althor moved faster, with enhanced speed, whipping up his leg while he threw his body forward. It took him a bare second to knock them both out. As they crumpled to the ground, someone outside the fenced area shouted.
Althor grabbed Daniel’s arm and ran for the hangar, yanking Daniel along, nearly dragging him. We ran after them. What else could we do? He obviously meant to use Daniel as a hostage, which hadn’t been part of our deal, but unless we intended to desert him
now and let the milcops detain us, we had no choice but to follow his lead.
As we veered around the scaffolding, three milcops ran out from the hangar. None was armed, but they brought two dogs with them, a black one and a lean red monster. One of the milcops shouted, and the dogs bounded toward us.
Althor threw Daniel to the side. The dogs hit Althor full force and they fell to the ground, the dogs tearing at his suit, trying for his neck as he wrestled with them. Moving in a blur, he heaved them off his body. They hit the asphalt hard, and the black one lay there, eyes closed, breathing raggedly. The red dog lifted its head and tried to climb to its feet.
As Althor jumped up, Daniel backed away, toward the scaffolding. He didn’t get far; Althor grabbed his arm and swung him around to face the milcops. He slapped his knife flat against Daniel’s neck.
The knife’s brilliance shattered the sunlight. The red dog growled, on its feet again, but a command from a milcop stayed it. Daniel stood stiff as a board, sweat running down his face. Grabbing my arm with his free hand, Althor backed toward the hangar, pulling us both with him.
We ran straight into the concrete dividers that held up the scaffolding. Although the Jag was only a few yards away, it might as well have been across the base. The canvas swung open on the side farthest from us and a group of people in white coveraEs appeared with another milcop. Rather than take them to the man-gate’on this side, near us, he puEed the chain-link fence away from the far side of the hangar and took them out that way.
The milcops in front of us squinted in the glare from Althor’s knife. A man with hair cut so close to his head that it looked like yeEow dust spoke. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
“Move away from the ship,” Althor said. “Or I kill him.”
“We don’t want anyone hurt.” The milcop had a soothing voice. But something bothered me. Had his attention flicked to a point behind Althor?
I glanced back and saw a man with an M-16 coming through the scaffolding. He gave me a reassuring nod, apparently assuming I was a hostage. In truth, he was right, though at the time I didn’t see it that way. I turned around, trying to look as if I were going along with him. But I spoke to Althor under my breath. “A man is coming up behind us. He’s two steps—”
Althor whirled and kicked up his leg, thudding his heel into the man’s chest with an accuracy that suggested he already knew the milcop was there. The guard crumpled and Althor lunged over the dividers, still holding Daniel and me, forcing us to scramble with him. As Heather and Joshua threw themselves over the barrier, something whizzed so close to my head that it brushed my hafr. We fell on our stomachs next to the unconscious milcop. Bullets hit the dividers, sending concrete chips flying into the air, and the barrier split into a network of cracks. “Stop shooting,” someone shouted. “You’ll hit the ship!” Althor grabbed the fallqji guard’s M-16, studied it for a second, and fired over the dividers, spraying the area with bullets. The milcops scattered, most running for the hangar’s cover. They released three more dogs, and as we crawled behind the dividers the beasts bounded toward us, growling, fangs showing. Althor fired and one dog dropped, then another, then the last. I bit my lip, trying not to cry out as the animals died.
Clenching the M-16 in one hand, Althor played his fingers over the transcom in his body, its display lighting up his side. A shriek burst out of it, one that continually changed pitch and quality, going too high to hear, dropping into audible range, then down so low that I felt rather than heard it, then back into hearing range. I later learned it was working in conjunction with components and convoluted waveguides within his body. The scaffolding around us began to shake. Beams creaked like racehorses straining at the starting gate, and with a groaning snap, one of the supports broke free, flying away from the structure.
The scaffolding buckled. We lunged to our feet, running for the Jag whEe metal and wood fell around us. I didn’t understand Althor’s purpose; the coEapsing structure was more danger to us than to anyone else. People were shouting, someone saying he couldn’t get off a clear shot. Someone else ordered him not to shoot, that the buEet might rebound into the hangar. I realized then that the chaos was helping more than hurting us.
An edge of something hit my head and I stumbled, the world going dark.
“No!” Althor grabbed me around the waist, half carrying me as he ran. A milcop appeared in front of us. My dazed brain saw his movements like a high-speed parade of snapshots: he raised his M-16; Althor’s boot hit his arm; the gun barked; shots went wEd over Althor’s head; the milcop collapsed as Althor barreled into him. The canvas on the hangar loomed in front of us—
And we stopped.
Four milcops stood there, their backs to the canvas, only a few yards away their M-16s trained on Althor. He stared at them, his inner lids glinting in the sunlight. He still had his gun, but if he tried to aim and fire it, we all knew the milcops would shoot. He might get off one round, but not before they fired. And they were too close to miss.
The man with dust-blond hair spoke to Althor. “Drop your weapons.”
Althor touched the transcom in his waist, sEencing it. His face was impassive, but I felt his frustration like steel bands. I picked up something else, too, an emotion less easy to define. Fear? Some, yes, but this was different. Longing. To stand this close to the Jag and be unable to reach it was physically painful to him.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” the dust-blond man said. His awe felt like velvet on my skin. He would shoot Althor if necessary, but he didn’t want to. None of the guards was supposed to know what Althor was, but they had guessed. This one wanted to talk to him, ask a hundred questions, not as an interrogation, but to speak to our first visitor from beyond Earth. He wanted to ' understand why Althor looked human, why he was here, how his ship worked. He wanted Althor to help us fly to the stars.
Actually, two of the milcops felt that way. The third was just doing his job. The fourth, a man with a clenched face, made me uneasy. He saw Althor as a threat beyond imagining. Had he and Althor been alone, he would have shot Althor point-blank with no qualms at all, certain he was protecting Earth. Fear made his thoughts vivid: he disagreed with the decision to place no explosives on Althor’s ship—better to risk losing the Mojave Desert than the entire planet.
Voices came from behind us. Glancing back, I saw a line of milcops several yards away. One, a woman, was speaking into a walkie-talkie, making a report. Dispirited, I turned back. The dust-blond man was still talking in his soothing voice: drop your weapon, release your hostages, come with us. As Althor let the M-16 slide out of his hand, I closed my eyes. It was over. Done. We were caught.
“Whoa, shit,” a voice yelled. “It’s alive!”
I snapped opened my eyes. Everyone was staring at the hangar entrance. The wind had lifted the canvas again, kept lifting it, in fact, higher than seemed reasonable given the weights holding it down. Then I realized it wasn’t wind pushing that canvas up.
Althor couldn’t go to the Jag, so it was coming to him.
It rolled out fast, straight at us. The milcops scattered, running to keep from being crushed. As soon as the man with the clenched face was clear, he spun around and fired his M-16 at the ship.
“Don’t shoot it!” someone shouted.
Althor ran for his ship, dragging Daniel and me with him, so close to the Jag that my hand rubbed it. The hull had a pebbly texture, like a golf ball. A hatch sucked-open and Althor lifted me off the; ground, literally throwing me inside. I slid across a deck of glowing blue tiles and plowed into a pile of computer printouts. Althor shoved Daniel after me, then jumped inside while Daniel rolled out of the way. Heather and Joshua scrambled in just before the hatch sucked closed like the shutter on a high-speed camera.
As I jumped to my feet, an explosion rocked the ship and flung us across the cabin. Althor’s injured shoulder smashed against a bulkhead and I felt agony sear through him, so intense he almost blacked out. But he didn’t falter. He pushed into the cockpit,
squeezing between the bulkhead and pilot’s seat. Papers, pens, and calculators lay strewn over the console in front of him. He sent them flying with a sweep of his hand and shoved himself into the seat. It snapped an exoskeleton around his body in a form-fitting mesh, bringing an array of panels to his fingertips.
Then it touched his mind.
Althor gasped. At least, that was the audible sound. In his mind, he screamed. His link with the Jag shattered. I only picked up a ghost of his pain, but even that almost sent me into shock.
Another explosion hit the ship, a dull boom against the hull. The force of it threw me into Daniel and we fell-with an impact that sent my breath out in a gasp. Scrambling back to our feet, we grabbed handholds in the bulkhead, hanging on with Heather and Joshua.
Althor quit trying to reach the Jag through his web and spoke in his own language. A screen in front of him glittered blue, swirling with lines and speckles. Then a three-dimensional image of the scene outside appeared.
Some of the milcops had backed away from the ship, staring at it with a mixture of fear and wonder. Several were struggling with the clenched-face man, trying to wrest away his gun. He flipped one over his back and knocked out another, tearing away from them long enough to throw something at the Jag. As another blast shook the ship, I saw the dust-blond milcop fire his M-16—not at the Jag, but at the man with the clenched face. The man went down, clamping one hand around his knee.
Althor was still speaking to the Jag, low and fast: The ship hovered at the edges of his mind, extending probes here, there, making brief connections, withdrawing if Althor flinched, strengthening the link if he didn’t.
A rainbow appeared in the holo of the scene outside, superimposed over it. As the colors swept across the milcops, they clapped their hands to their ears. From my link to the Jag, I picked up what happened: the ship was using membranes in its hull to make sound waves painful to human ears. The rainbow was an image the Jag produced in the holo of the scene outside to show the waves: red for maximum density, purple for minimum.
The milcops backed away taking the two injured men with them. Several were already out of the enclosure and sprinting for an office building, one shouting into a walkie-talkie. They had no way of knowing what the Jag was about to do. Attack? Explode?