Before Jenna could answer, Mercy spoke. “I’ll stay. You can keep me as collateral.”
“Mercy, no.” Jenna heard Noah echoing her own denial, but Mercy just shook her head.
“It’s okay, Jenna. I believe you. I know that you have to do this. It sickens me that we were used like this.” Jenna knew what Mercy meant by ‘we.’ She wasn’t just Jenna’s sister or mother. All of the clones had been created using her DNA. “And this way, we’ll still be together when it’s all over.”
Cort just laughed. “What the hell? It’s a deal.”
RISE
56
The flight took six hours but to Jenna it felt like hardly any time had passed. Part of this was due to her anxiety about what would happen when they arrived. Time always seemed to drag when she was looking forward to something good — the last day of school or a birthday — and flew by when something bad loomed on the horizon.
She thought she would be able to spend at least some of the trip sleeping, but even though she felt dead on her feet, every time she closed her eyes, she had a vision of Mercy, flanked by Cort’s men, waving good-bye. She settled for a hot meal from the Gulfstream’s galley, washed down with several bottles of Pepsi, and she listened in as the rest of the group discussed strategy.
Cort had wasted no time asserting his authority, and Noah did not challenge him. Jenna sensed that her insistence on making the trip — and her decision to surrender to Cort at the cost of Mercy’s freedom — had taken the wind out of Noah’s sails. That, and the fact that he had been shot just eighteen hours earlier.
The wound wasn’t serious — the bullet had deflected off a rib, fracturing it and tearing up the surrounding tissue, but doing no damage to vital organs — but a gunshot was a gunshot. He bore the pain stoically, but Jenna saw how he winced a little whenever he changed position.
He had been taken to the hospital, along with the two deputies who — Jenna was pleased to learn — had also survived the shooting, thanks to their standard-issue body armor. Noah had managed to slip away but had arrived at Mercy’s trailer just as the police were showing up. With no way to track Jenna and Mercy, he had turned to his old handler at the Agency — Bill Cort — who had briefed him on the sanction and the reasons behind it. Noah had been as surprised as Cort when he learned of Jenna’s arrival at the safe house.
Jenna didn’t believe Cort’s assertion that he had been out of the loop on the decision to send the hit team, but they were well past the point where recriminations would make any difference.
Soter also seemed to have set aside his aversion toward the men who had killed his team and destroyed his lab fifteen years earlier. Jenna suspected that had more to do with the realization that he had been a pawn in the opening move in a war to destroy humanity. He spent nearly two full hours describing the history of the project. The account was more or less the same as what he had told Jenna during the flight from Miami, but the air of pride had faded. It was now a recitation of facts. When he was done, he gave what information he could concerning the whereabouts of more than a dozen clones — Jenna noted that he no longer referred to them as his children.
The conversation had come around to the transmission’s origin. Soter maintained that an extraterrestrial intelligence was the most plausible explanation, but Cort seemed reluctant to even speculate. “Let’s just deal with one thing at time,” he said.
It seemed to Jenna like textbook denial. An extraterrestrial explanation would not only mean a threat beyond comprehension, and possibly against which humanity would be powerless, but it would also invalidate a host of beliefs about the nature of life and the meaning of existence. It was no surprise that Cort shied away from the topic. Jenna had her own reasons for not wanting to discuss it. The entire conversation had been an excruciating ordeal, in which her very artificial origin was dissected and put on display. Her unique abilities — what her school teachers called ‘gifts’—had occasionally made her the target of ridicule from jealous classmates, but she had never felt the kind of embarrassment she now felt listening to this discussion.
She felt like a freak. No, worse than that: an illegitimate freak.
Noah sensed her discomfort, holding her hand, squeezing reassurance into her, but she endured without comment. The events surrounding her, past and future, were much more important than her hurt feelings.
The discussion turned to the question of how to proceed when they arrived at their destination. Cort tried to arrange for Agency assets from Texas and California to be sent in ahead of them, but the remote location confounded those efforts. He contacted the military, but was tight-lipped about the full results of that conversation, saying only that there would be no additional boots on the ground, meaning that the little group in the Gulfstream would be the sole defenders of the human race. If they failed, it would be game over.
“What should we expect?” Cort asked.
Soter turned to Jenna.
“How should I know?” she snapped, but then she realized why he had deferred to her. If anyone could predict what the clones would do, it would be her. Yet the truth was that she didn’t know. The door to the implanted memories remained shut. The only thing she really knew for sure was that the urge to go to the coordinates in the message was overpowering. Even now, with the memories ripped from her head, Jenna felt the irresistible urge. The other clones surely felt it, too. She wondered how many were on their way there? She did not share this insight with Cort, though, and he noticed the omission.
“I signed off on this little field trip because you insisted that only you could stop them,” he reminded her.
“I’ll understand it better when I get there,” she said.
They were nearly at their destination, and she still had no idea what was going to happen.
After landing, they headed out from Socorro on US Route 60. Noah was at the wheel of their rented Jeep Cherokee, maintaining a steady seventy-five miles per hour. Cort sat in the front passenger seat. Soter and Jenna were in the back. She could see distant mountain ranges on the horizon, but the foreground was flat and desolate. Florida was flat, but at least there were palm trees to break up the monotony. Here, there was nothing except the occasional herd of cattle, and — distant but growing ever larger — an irregular line of satellite dishes.
As they approached, Jenna began to appreciate just how extraordinary the Very Large Array was. Unlike the Arecibo Observatory, which made use of a single enormous dish, more or less fixed in place, the Very Large Array’s twenty-seven individual dishes — each more than eighty feet in diameter and arranged in a Y-shaped pattern with legs that extended more than thirteen miles in each direction — worked in unison to create a single antenna that could be extended to a maximum twenty-two miles across. A tourist brochure she had picked up in Socorro described how the 230-ton dishes could be moved as needed using a special transport vehicle running on railroad tracks that extended to the Y’s full limit.
As the full scope of the observatory came into view, Cort looked back at Jenna. “Why does it have to be here? Couldn’t this signal be sent from any radio telescope?”
Soter answered before Jenna could admit her ignorance. “We can only speculate about the reason, but my hypothesis is that the intelligence behind the message was very familiar with our capabilities and our potential. In 1977, when the Wow! Signal and the transmission I later received were sent, the VLA was the best radio telescope on Earth. The author of the transmission could expect that it would still be functioning thirty-seven years later. The same cannot be said for the Big Ear telescope, which received the Wow! Signal. It was dismantled in 1998 to make room for a golf course.”