Red Knight Falling (24 page)

FORTY-FOUR

The power cycled again. This time, though, it sprang a new surprise on us. Every screen in mission control, from the farthest workstations to the three wall screens, erupted with a colorful cartoon. A cat flew over a digital cityscape, trailing a stream of rainbows behind it.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Kevin groaned.

I looked his way. “Steranko?”

“Showing us he’s got the entire base’s network under his control,” he said. “With a goddamn Nyan Cat meme? That’s not stale or anything. Next thing you know, he’ll probably—”

He paused as a string of text scrolled under the animation, shouting out again and again in big white block letters:
A
LL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
.

“—there it is,” Kevin said. “Unoriginal
asshole
.”

“Can you
do
anything about it?” Jessie asked him. “If there was ever a time for you to whip out a miracle, it’s now. You’re the only one who can.”

He looked up at the wall screens. His shoulders sagged.

“No,” he said.

“Kevin,” Jessie said, “there aren’t any other options. If we can’t get these computers back online and working for us, that rocket doesn’t launch.”

“I
can’t
. Steranko’s a walking encyclopedia of hacker tricks. He’s outmaneuvered me every time we’ve faced off, and I guarantee he’ll do it again. The stuff he knows—”

He paused, frozen in a thought.

“Kevin?” I said.

He raised his chin. A slow smile rose to his lips.

“Roman Steranko. You stale, tired
wannabe
. I just figured your ass out. You are
busted
.”

Jessie blinked. “You wanna fill the rest of us in?”

“Colonel!” Kevin shouted across the room. “I need two laptops with an independent power supply and satellite modems, a zip drive, and also all the access codes for your entire base. Please.”

Bette strode toward him. “What do you know?”

“I know how to beat him. Give me the tools and the info, and I’ll get your network back.”

She stared him down, silent, looking deep in his eyes. Then she turned to Colonel Bradley.

“Give him everything he wants,” she said, “double time.”

It took less than five minutes. They cleared a workstation while he powered up the two bulky olive-shelled computers, running on battery power and isolated from the base’s grid. Kevin waved April over.

“Doc, I need your help on this one. I’m gonna whip up a few batch files on this laptop, drop them onto the zip drive, and pass them over to you so you can run them on yours. We’re gonna have to be fast.
Real
fast.”

April rolled up alongside him and adjusted her bifocals. “Ready,” she said.

“Kevin,” Jessie said, “what are you doing?”

He flashed a manic grin as he typed, fingers flying, hunched over the laptop screen with his face bathed in luminous green light.

“Memes,” he said. “Tired, busted memes.”

“English,” Jessie said. “Speak it.”

“The worm he used to hit us at Spearhead? It was Pixie’s exact code, line for line. The methods he used to break into our comms? Identical routine to this gang of cyberthieves operating out of Kiev. Everything he does is a carbon copy of what another hacker’s done before him. A perfect copy.”

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Steranko knows more about hacking than me, that much is true. See, he’s got a photographic memory. And that’s handy, but that’s also as far as it goes:
all
he knows how to do is imitate
other people’s work
. He’s nothing but a goddamn script kiddie with an attitude. He can’t adapt, can’t rewrite his code on the fly. What he doesn’t know how to do is
improvise
.”

He looked up at the wall screens, one finger poised over the “Enter” key.

“But I do.”

He hit the key. The overhead lights strobed back to full power, and the wall screens flickered back to life as the base generators all kicked online at once.

Kevin shook his head at a wave of applause from the technicians. “Hold up, he’ll have control back in about thirty seconds and you’ll be down again. That was just my opening feint. The attack I let him see coming. Now he’ll think he’s unstoppable.”

The power shifted back to the emergency generators, and the flying cat returned. This time, the scrawl of text under the cartoon read:
W
EAK SAUCE, KID
. T
IRED OF SUCKING YET?

Kevin unplugged the thumb-size zip drive from his laptop and passed it to April. “Okay, slot that in and type exactly what I tell you. You’re going to be me. He’ll see you coming and counter your every move. We’ll let him. And while you’re sparring back and forth, I’ll be doing my
real
work on
this
system.”

Jessie stood behind him, clasping Kevin’s shoulder. “You sure you’ve got this? One hundred percent?”

“One hundred percent, boss. Just stop Mikki—beating Roman Steranko won’t matter if there isn’t a rocket left to launch.”

“Colonel,” Bette said, “we’re going out there. Once the systems come back online, no matter what happens, launch the Atlas.”

He shook his head. “If you’re within two kilometers of the launchpad when that bird takes off—”

“We’ll be killed by the back blast, yes.” She glanced my way, making eye contact. “I believe we’re all prepared for that eventuality. No matter what,
launch that rocket
.”

No time to reach the base armory, so Bette rounded up every security-force officer she could find and commandeered their sidearms, leaving us with a brace of Beretta M9s. Not exactly heavy firepower, but it’d have to do. I gripped my pistol tight and led the way, Cody and Jessie right behind.

Outside the Flight Control Center, the wind hit me like a slap in the face. It howled through the palm trees as the roiling black clouds lit up with dry lightning. I felt the storm pressure in my sinuses, the sky aching to burst and drown the world. We ran for the jeep. Bette jumped behind the wheel, and we clambered in as she gunned the engine.

“Mikki’s gotta have visual on anyone she burns,” Jessie shouted over the wind. “Direct line of sight. I’ve seen her do it through a sniper scope, too—distance isn’t a problem for her. Head for the pad: all we need to do is keep her and Roman’s goons off it until mission control is ready to launch.”

Bette slammed on the gas. I sank back on the hard padded bench as the jeep squealed off across the tarmac.

“You sure your guy can get it done?” she shouted back.

Jessie nodded, a determined smile on her lips.

“Yeah. He’s my guy. He can get it done.”

Slick Three rose up in the distance. The Atlas rocket stood like a snowbound skyscraper on the launchpad, surrounded by towering skeletal girders. Cody grabbed my shoulder and pointed off to the right.

“Harmony, incoming!”

Motorcycles roared against the wind, four of them inbound and angling hard to race us to the Atlas. They were sport bikes, sleek black Yamahas with two riders each: one to steer, and one to shoot. A passenger swiveled on his seat, spotted us, and pointed our way with a machine pistol in his gloved hand. The pistol chattered and Bette swerved hard as a row of bullet holes blossomed across the jeep’s front window.

Cody stood up behind me, steadying himself against the jeep’s roll bar with one hand as he took aim and snapped off two quick shots. A front tire sparked, and the motorcycle flipped end over end, throwing its riders to the asphalt. The three remaining bikes put on a burst of speed, getting out ahead of us and fanning out to give their shooters a better angle. I leaned against the door, took careful aim—then ducked back as gunfire blasted the jeep’s side mirror into scrap metal.

Jessie opened fire. Bullets riddled one shooter’s chest, and he slumped into his driver, throwing off his balance and sending the motorcycle into a skidding crash. The last two bikes sped up, engines whining, more intent on reaching the rocket than on stopping us.

I knew Mikki was here—I’d heard the airman on the radio burn—but I didn’t see her anywhere. If she was going to make a move on the rocket while Roman had the base locked down, why hadn’t she done it yet?

The twin motorcycles slipped out of view, turning fast and swerving around the launchpad. The Atlas rose up before us, larger than life and pinned in hard spotlights, standing in a billowing cloud of white mist that spilled from disconnected hoses. Beneath the mammoth engines, a door the size of a bank vault—and looking twice as thick—stood bolted shut at the edge of the blast pit.

“Rubber room,” Bette said as she cornered hard, following the bikers’ trail. “It’s an emergency bunker; the ground crew must have locked themselves in when the shooting started.”

Both of the motorcycles stood parked at the pit’s edge. One of the bikers spun on his heel, raising his machine pistol to fire, just in time for the jeep to slam into him at fifty miles an hour. Bette stomped on the brakes and threw the jeep into a screeching spinout, the wheels thumping as we rolled over the gunman’s body and jolted to a bone-rattling stop.

Of the three survivors, two were scrambling up the gantry alongside the rocket while another was down in the blast pit, running for the boosters with a satchel in his arms. Jessie jumped out, aimed on the run, and fired. The one in the pit went down with a bullet in his back. Bette sprinted ahead of us, heading for the gantry with her pistol holstered and hands empty.

Not unarmed, though. As she clasped her hands to the metal arch, golden lightning coursed up the steel girders, engulfing the gantry in a cocoon of elemental fury to rival the storm clouds above. Thunder pealed with the sound of an earthquake, and bodies rained down: the last of Roman’s men, their electrified corpses charred and smoking.

Bette let go of the metal, panting, leaning against it for support. She waved me back as I approached her.

“Careful,” she gasped, “I get aftershocks sometimes. Don’t want to get too close to me right now.”

I heard more engines in the distance, revving over the howling wind, and distant gunfire. But no Mikki. One of the fallen bodies had a singed leather satchel slung over one broken shoulder. I crouched down and opened it up, expecting to find plastic explosives on a timer.

Instead, I found tools. A small craftsman’s drill, a serrated knife, a hammer and chisel. Nothing with a prayer of cracking the rocket’s shell, let alone detonating it.
What were they trying to do?
I thought, following their paths with my gaze.

More gunmen were on their way, a psychotic pyrokinetic was lurking somewhere in the dark, and we had less than an hour to launch the Atlas and save the world. I needed to work out their plan, and fast.

FORTY-FIVE

The body in the pit. He hadn’t been running toward the boosters, I realized. He’d been running toward the hose assembly that snaked along the blackened concrete floor. More fat yellow hoses dangled along the gantry, hooked to the rocket’s belly, right where the climbers could have been headed.

“Bette,” I said, pointing, “what’s in those?”

She pushed herself away from the girder. “Fuel lines.”

Now I knew what they were after.

“Jessie,” I said, “Mikki’s on the move, right now, on her way to a vantage point. Someplace with a great view of the rocket and out of any possible blast radius.”

She tilted her head at me. “How do you know?”

“The tools. These guys weren’t after the rocket; they were told to breach the
fuel lines
. Cut them open, drill a hole, whatever worked. Cody, do you remember chasing that Xerxes convoy back in Oregon?”

“Sure,” he said, “you had me shoot the Hummer’s gas tank, then you did your . . . witch thing to it, with the fire.”

“Right. I needed a way to reach the fuel. And so does she. Jessie, you said Mikki needs to
see
whatever she combusts. She could focus her power on the rocket all night long, but all she’d do is heat up the outer shell, and I don’t know if she’s powerful enough to cause an explosion that way.”

“But if she’s watching from a distance,” Jessie said, “and she’s got a binocular’s-eye view of a leaking fuel trail . . .”

“Exactly. She uses her power on the leak, the fire streaks up the hose, into the rocket, and boom. Just like I did to that Hummer, but bigger. A
lot
bigger.”

“This base is twenty-two square miles,” Bette said. “She could be almost anywhere.”

I shook my head. “Not just anywhere. Nowhere within five miles of the pad, for safety. And she’ll be meeting up with Roman. Now, he had to have been here for a while before the full attack began, taking the time to hack those generators. Someplace out of sight, where base security wouldn’t patrol and he’d be free to work in peace. Both of them are egotists; they’d want to see the whole thing, savor their moment of triumph from . . .”

I looked to the distance, where mountainous foothills rose up at the base’s farthest edge.

“. . . from on high,” I said. “They’re in the hills. Bette, can you get the ground crew out of that bunker and finish prepping the rocket for launch?”

She nodded, sharp. “Done.”

“Good. The second you’re finished, get inside cover and radio back to mission control.” I looked to Jessie and Cody. “We’re going after them.”

I looked to the jeep, its front end steaming and spattered with blood, then to the twin black Yamahas. Keys still in the ignitions.

“Uh, I don’t actually know how to drive one of those,” Cody said.

“That’s okay,” I told him as I swung one leg over the bike’s saddle. “I do. Get on back and hold tight.”

Jessie grabbed the other bike and we sped off, tearing across the tarmac. We didn’t take the direct route: if Mikki spotted us coming, she could burn us down in a heartbeat. Instead, we wove around silent, empty launchpads and hugged the outside walls of assembly bays, grabbing any cover we could find on our way to the foothills.

The terrain got sparse, then rocky, the land at the base’s edge rising up in a steep and jagged slope. Cody’s hands held tight around my hips as I pulled the bike over, his breath warm against the back of my neck.

“Let’s go on foot from here,” I said. “Don’t want them to hear us coming.”

The three of us climbed the foothills under furious skies, the clouds moving faster now, churning like billowing plumes of black oil. As I scrambled up a sharp slope, crouched and grabbing at a rock outcropping for support, a fork of lightning lanced down and speared the peak high above. The thunder boomed like a gunshot in my ear, reverberating through the dry night air.

That wasn’t the only light above us. I froze, holding up my open hand to stop Jessie and Cody, and then pointed. About a hundred feet up and to the left, I made out a faint electric glow. I pointed at myself and Cody, making a circular motion to suggest our approach. Then at Jessie, twirling my finger in the opposite direction. A flanking maneuver. They both nodded.

Jessie broke away, crouching low as she clambered across the rocks, and Cody and I continued our ascent. Before long, I could make out voices over the wind.

“—don’t see them at all,” Mikki was saying. “Something’s wrong. You need to get down to the pad.”

“That’s a joke, right?” Roman replied. “I’m a bit occupied here, babe. That kid’s a tenacious little bastard. I keep shutting him out of the system, but he just won’t give up.”

“Yeah, he certainly has more staying power than
some
people I could mention.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” Mikki said.

Roman had made his last stand on a flat outcropping of mossy rock, a fine balcony to look out over the base and view the destruction. Fires burned here and there, spots of orange and yellow in the wake of his gunmen’s rampage, but the Atlas still stood strong. He’d put up a heavy olive tarp on tent poles, a canopy to protect him and his gear from the impending storm. A laptop sat upon a sturdy folding table, next to a small electric lamp. Roman played the computer’s keyboard like a virtuoso pianist, his symphony keeping the entire base locked down and dark.

Mikki stood beside him, frowning through her binoculars as she scanned the landscape. Not far to her right, a pair of off-road motorbikes waited to provide a quick escape.

We could open fire, gun them both down from behind, and end it all. They’d never even see it coming. I held the pistol in a dry, tight grip, my eyes narrowed as we crept up on them. Then I thought about what they were worth as prisoners. Getting our hands on Roman’s client list, the destination of every cursed and dangerous artifact he’d stolen and sold on the black market, could save countless lives. As for Mikki, she’d apparently gotten up close and personal with Bobby Diehl. If she knew anything that could bring us closer to taking down Diehl—and the Network, if Agent Cooper’s story was true—we needed to take her alive.

That meant I needed a plan to neutralize Mikki. I’d tasted her power in Orlando, wrestling with her for Kevin’s life. I didn’t like my odds for a rematch. Of course, we’d battled through a middleman. I’d been fighting a war on two fronts, trying to shut her down while keeping Kevin from burning alive. As a witch, I was a jack-of-all-trades—banishings and exorcisms, bindings and curses—while Mikki was a one-trick pony. And she was better at that one trick than all of my spells combined. In a contest of brute force, she couldn’t lose.

I’d need to draw her attention fast, keep her focused on me so I could hit her at full strength.

I handed my pistol to Cody. I wanted my hands free.

The three of us burst from cover at once, Cody and Jessie with their guns raised high.

“Both of you, hands up!” Jessie barked. “It’s over.”

Roman smirked as he turned to face us, and Mikki just laughed.

“Somebody hasn’t been watching the clock,” Mikki said. “It
is
over. You’ve got less than an hour before the King of Silence touches down and Bobby Diehl puts him on a leash. Go ahead. Arrest us. Lock us up and throw away the key. Who cares? Once Bobby wields the king’s power, he’ll come and rescue us. And then you’re
really
gonna be screwed.”

“It’s too late to stop us,” Roman said. “No way you can get the base’s systems back online in time for the launch. The best thing you can do for yourselves is let us go, and
maybe
Bobby’ll decide to be merciful once he’s a walking demigod.”

“But I probably won’t,” Mikki added.

“Damn,” Kevin’s voice chirped over the laptop’s speakers, “do you two
ever
get tired of hearing yourselves talk?”

All eyes shot to the laptop, where a new window popped open on its own and filled the screen. Kevin loomed in the webcam’s eye, giving a wave.

“Knock, knock,” Kevin said.

Roman and Mikki just froze, staring at his image. Jessie grinned and called out, “Who’s there?”

“God,” Kevin said, and spread his open hands. “So let there be light.”

Far below us, the base surged back to life.

Lights blazed against the darkness, from residential streetlamps to landing-strip spotlights, from launchpad to launchpad, miles and miles of diamond-white glory burning as the generators rose to full power. Vandenberg was a city, a citadel, unbowed and unbreakable. A citadel dedicated, in that moment, to a singular purpose.

I heard the loudspeaker in the mission control room, behind Kevin’s back. Starting the countdown.

“What—” Roman stammered, “but . . .
how
?”

“Easy. While you were chasing your own tail all over the base’s system, I was penetrating
yours
. Oh, I had help, too.” He glanced to his side. “Take a bow, Doc.”

April leaned into the camera’s view and offered a wry salute.

“Mmm, smell that?” Kevin asked Roman. “Smells like . . . failure. Like failure and sadness. Oh, hey, it’s
you
!”

Mikki whirled to face Jessie, her fingers curled at her sides like they wanted to be wrapped around my throat.
“Burn,”
she growled.

Then her pupils blossomed, blotting out the whites, turning her eyes into chasms of inky darkness.

And in the darkness, a firestorm.