Gunnar looks up. Nods.
Abdul stands and turns on the shower as high as it will go. Sujan moves closer, a pair of wire cutters concealed beneath his towel.
Gunnar bends forward, allowing the Tibetan access to his collar. “Sever the connections running out from the remote,” he whispers, “but keep the collars intact.” He holds his breath, bracing for Sorceress’s response.
Abdul soaks his head beneath the cool water, moaning aloud, concealing the two metallic snips from the microphone.
Sujan hurries to Rocky, cutting her collar’s wires in the same fashion.
“Can you help us take the ship?” Sujan whispers.
“It’s possible,” Rocky says. “But we’d need to gain access to the computer vault. What happened to the platter charge attached to the prototype?”
Sujan shrugs. “It’s possible Simon had Sorceress store it in the starboard weapons bay. The Chinese loaded crates of explosives in there before we stole the ship.”
“The computer will never allow you access,” Kaigbo warns.
“No,” Gunnar whispers, “but maybe David will.”
Aboard the Boeing 747-400 YAL-IA 38,000 feet over Zaire
General Jackson is seated in the copilot’s chair, watching the fuel line retract into the belly of the S-3B Viking flying just ahead of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
“How’re you holding up, Captain?”
Air Force pilot Christopher Hoskins turns to the general. “Between you and me, I’d rather be dirt-biking, sir. Don’t mind the flying, but sleeping on that bunk is killing my back.”
“Mine, too. What’s our ETA to Goliath’s last launch site?”
“Six hours. No other updates from the Scranton?”
“None.”
Captain Udelsman enters the cockpit and hands the general a folded fax. Jackson’s hands tremble as he reads the daily briefing. Preliminary death toll estimates from Beijing have surpassed 2.6 million. Among the confirmed deceased are the Chinese president and nearly every high-ranking Communist official in the government. Three million civilians residing just outside the blast zone are suffering from extensive burns and radiation poisoning, the victims dying at a rate of several hundred an hour. Medical teams and supplies are en route from all over the world, but the situation is beyond critical. Burn centers are overwhelmed, the population mindless with panic, fleeing by the tens of millions.
On the second page is a report from Amnesty International verifying that all Chinese military personnel and civilians have fled Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. Seven thousand prisoners have been liberated, their Chinese oppressors leaving behind sickening evidence of sixty years of brutality and torture.
The last ten pages describe a primordial fear that has gripped the world. Economies have crawled to a standstill, businesses closed, schools shut down. Banks have closed, forcing citizens to turn to looting. The National Guard has taken over hot spots, a dusk-to-dawn curfew instituted. Major cities are being abandoned. Washington, D.C., has been shut down, the president and his cabinet moved to the underground complex known as Mount Weather.
The nuclear genie has run amok. Humanity has crossed a dangerous threshold, and nothing will ever be the same.
Jackson feels his skin break out in a cold sweat. He leaves the cockpit and returns to his seat in the control room. Adjusts the column of air above his head. Loosens his tie.
A sensation of nausea lurches in the pit of his stomach. Rushing from his seat, Jackson bursts into an unoccupied lavatory and loses his breakfast in the toilet.
Aboard the Goliath
The watertight door swings open. David exits the surgical suite, nearly stumbling over Gunnar. The former Army Ranger is passed out in the corridor, an empty bottle of vodka lying near his hand.
“Useless drunk.” David steps over the body.
Gunnar leaps to his feet, whipping his arm around David’s windpipe.
WARNING: ELECTRONIC COLLAR IS NOT FUNCTIONING.
“Evening, David.” Gunnar presses the prongs of the stainless-steel fork to David’s trachea.
“Gunnar, don’t … please—”
“Let’s go for a walk.” Gunnar heads forward, leading him to the end of the corridor where a sealed watertight door separates the main compartment from the starboard wing. “Okay, David, tell your mistress to open up.”
“Gunnar, wait—”
“Open the door, or I’ll tear open your throat.”
“Sorceress, open the door.”
The lock unbolts, the hydraulic pistons firing, swinging the steel door open.
Gunnar escorts David down a steel catwalk positioned high above a myriad of pipes, valves, and computer circuits.
Fifty yards, and the walkway intersects with a dark, narrow passage on their left. Gunnar pushes David ahead of him into the alcove, and to the sealed watertight door of the starboard weapons bay.
“Open it.”
“Gunnar—”
“Do it now!”
“Sorceress, open the starboard weapons bay.”
A hiss of hydraulics and the heavy steel door swings open.
An ungodly stench blasts Gunnar in the face, as if he has stuck his head down a sewer. He pushes David into the dimly lit compartment. “Smells like something died in here. Oh … shit—”
Mounted on a vertical torpedo storage rack, his outstretched wrists and crossed ankles bound to the mechanical steel arms by microwire cable, is the rotting, crucified corpse of Thomas Chau. The dead Asian’s skin has turned a rancid, olive-green. Blood has pooled in the lower extremities, swelling the legs to twice their normal girth. A light shining on the skull-less head illuminates grotesque details of the exposed, wormlike folds of the festering brain.
“Gunnar, I didn’t do this, I swear.”
“What about those wires? What the hell is your computer doing?”
“Sorceress is programmed to learn. It was seeking … knowledge. I need to reset its parameters.”
“It needs to be shut down. Whose idea was it for Simon to interface with the computer?”
“Mine … both of ours. It was the only way to cure his cancer.”
A sudden movement to Gunnar’s right. He wheels about in a defensive posture.
An enormous loader drone releases a large object, which collapses to the decking.
Gunnar moves closer, dragging David by his hair.
Lying facedown on the floor is another body, mutilated, totally bled dry. Both hands are gone, severed at the wrists. The dead man’s upper torso is exposed, a hideous anatomical gap extending from his head clear down his back. The base of the skull and portions of the cervical vertebrae have been excised.
Attached to the brain and spinal cord is a delicate web of microwires that run out of the wound and into the distal end of one of the targeting drone’s robotic wrists.
“Taur Araujo, I presume. Looks like Sorceress did a little exploratory on him, too.”
“Let him go!”
Gunnar and David turn to see the older Albanian, Tafili, standing in the entrance. The physician cups one hand over his nose from the stench, the other points a gun at Gunnar’s chest. “I said, let him go.”
Gunnar swings David around, using him as a shield—
—momentarily lowering the fork from David’s throat.
The steel appendage swings down from the ceiling and blindsides him, the impact igniting a silver flare in his head.
The spinning ceiling fuses into blackness. Gunnar collapses to the deck.
David kicks the fork away in disgust. “What the hell happened to his collar?”