The Siren Project (57 page)

“What's happening?” Christa asked confused,
as air blasted toward them, driven by the tsunami rushing toward them.

“Just run!”

A moment later, the first wave blasted into
the corridor, engulfing them in a swirling, debris filled torrent that threw
them against the walls and rolled them end over end. In an instant, the blind
fury of the deluge consumed them.

* * * *

McNamara tried to twist the welder
from the woman’s hand, but her grip was relentless. He pulled himself in close,
reaching for her mask. Mitch tried to stop him with his free hand, but he was
too late. McNamara tore away the woman's air supply, then held the welder as
she inhaled liquid and convulsed. He pulled the welder free of her dead hand,
but Mitch still held tight, keeping its burning end angled away. McNamara stole
a breath from the woman's mask, then Mitch wrenched it from his hand, fending
him off as he pressed the air supply to his face. He had time to fill his lungs
once, before McNamara tore it away by the air hose, leaving the mask to bubble
uselessly by their side.

Mitch threw a mistimed kick at McNamara’s
groin, that only succeeded in spinning them slightly around. It was then he saw
the jagged hole in the control room window behind McNamara and the torrent
blasting through it under pressure. Another large piece of window collapsed and
the torrent increased. Mitch felt a hint of suction as a wisp of white hair drifted
toward the yawning opening, the first of many from a thousand dying bio
processing units.

Mitch kicked off the nearby stanchion,
trying to keep McNamara’s back to the control room, pushing them both toward
the black straps holding the dead automaton. McNamara sensed Mitch no longer
fought for control of the torch, just to keep it at bay. He took it as a sign
that Mitch was weakening at last. Mitch caught one of the drowned woman’s
securing straps, and used it as leverage to push McNamara away from the
superstructure, into the void between the rows of nodes. He released his hold
on the welder, letting McNamara drift away, beyond arms’ length.

McNamara looked confused as he floated
free, then from the corner of his eye, he saw the collapsed window. He felt the
pull of the current, and tried kicking and stroking one handed back to the safety
of the node. In a moment of self preservation, he dropped the welder and
stroked hard with both hands, but Mitch kicked him in the shoulder as he drew
near. McNamara spun around, floundering from the force of the kick and the
growing strength of the current. Mitch lunged forward with his free hand when
McNamara’s back was turned toward him, catching him in a headlock. He wrapped a
node securing strap around McNamara’s neck and pulled it tight, leaning back
with all his strength.

McNamara clawed the strap and Mitch’s
headlock with both hands as the suction caught them, pulling them both away
from the superstructure. The strap became tauter as the torrent took the
drowned woman in its grip, adding her weight to the strap, squeezing it tighter
around McNamara’s neck as he clawed vainly at Mitch’s face.

The suction increased as the immersion
solution raced into the control room and off through corridors like rapids
through a gorge. Bio processing units were torn from their nodes in a flash of
underwater electrical sparks, and sucked tumbling toward the chasm. A drowned
body wrenched from its node, struck Mitch hard in the back, slamming him into
McNamara and breaking his hold on the node strap. The impact jerked the node
strap tight, cracking McNamara’s neck and flinging Mitch out into the void. Mitch
was sucked away, with only a fleeting glimpse of McNamara’s lifeless body
tangled in the strap with the dead woman.

Mitch tried to catch the superstructure,
but it was out of reach and the racing current was now too fast to swim
against. He tumbled, desperate for air, toward the shattered glass of the
control room. Jagged fragments angled toward the gaping hole from all sides as
the jet of liquid blasted through it. A ten foot long splinter broke off, then he
shot through the serrated opening as if fired out of a cannon. Mitch broke the
surface as he was launched into the control room, gaining a single gasp of air
before being sucked under again, lost in a nightmare of swirling bubbles. He
hit the wall hard, spinning around inside a pressure wave before being sucked
into the central corridor that ran north through the building like a raging
river. The corridor buckled as equipment and furniture swept from adjoining
rooms, crashed against the walls and ceiling, sometimes blasting through into
sealed laboratories. Mitch’s head bobbed up amid the debris, long enough for a
single gasp of air before he was sucked under again.

The lights in the corridor went out,
leaving him in total darkness. He lost all sense of direction as he bounced off
walls and floors and debris thumped into him without warning. His lungs
screamed for air, then on the verge of drowning, his head bobbed up into the
air space close to the ceiling. He snatched a breath, then another, as he saw a
glow ahead racing toward him. A moment later and he burst through a shattered
doorway into the light, rolling end over end as the river fanned out across the
concrete apron bordering the northern wall of the building. The flood lost
depth and speed, until Mitch hit solid ground and came to rest.

He crawled onto his hands and knees,
coughing up the fluid he'd swallowed, wheezing for air. To his left, a fire was
burning furiously where the air defense system had exploded, and patches of
darkness across the otherwise brilliantly lit base marked where lights had
short circuited. Ahead was a wide, low windowless building and floundering in
the flood tide were the others. Mouse was bleeding from a nasty cut on his
forehead, and Gunter cradled a broken arm, while Christa and her mother seemed
unharmed.

Mitch stumbled to Christa, pulling her to
her feet but too short of breath to speak. She put her arms around him, hugging
him close, as the three FBI helicopters circled above. One of the helicopters
put a spotlight on them, while another hovered low to the ground. Lamar stood
in the chopper’s open doorway watching the solid stream of liquid pour from the
building. Occasionally, a body floated out, torn from its node, sometimes with
its skull cap missing, sometimes with severed cables still attached to the head
plate.

Gunter held his broken arm to his chest,
watching a middle aged dark skinned man float past, face down. “Such a pity. The
first time we find intelligent life, even if we made it, and we destroy it.”

“Better it, than us,” Mitch said, coughing.

“He saved your life,” Mouse said.

“I’ll thank my auto teller, next time I
make a withdrawal.”

Two black helicopter gunships appeared out
of the night sky, circling high above the FBI helicopters as they surveyed the
wreck of the main building, the dispersing lake of immersion solution and the
floating bodies of dead bio processing units. The gunships didn't attempt to fire
their guns, they just turned away after a few minutes, and flew off to the
west.

“Where do you suppose they’re going?”
Christa asked.

“To report,” Mitch said, his breath finally
returning. “Something tells me there’ll be a lot of file shredding in
Washington tonight.”

When the Apache gunships had vanished from
sight, one of the FBI helicopters dropped down to land, well outside the flood
zone. Agents clad in black, bullet proof vests and carrying automatic weapons
jumped out and ran toward them.

“At least we won’t have to walk home,”
Mitch said as he rubbed a sore spot on his back, “I feel like I’ve been kicked
by a dozen mules.”

“Are you kidding? You got off lightly,”
Christa pointed to her shaved head and smiled, “I’m having the worst bad hair
day of my life.”

“That makes two of us,” Christa’s mother
said, patting her shaved cranium.

Mouse rubbed his head, finding blood on his
fingers. “Why am I always the one to get hit in the head?”

“Because,” Mitch said, “Anything that
happens to your head is an improvement, even that hair cut.”

“Oh I don’t know, I kind of like it,” Mouse
said, rubbing his baldness thoughtfully, “Most advanced alien species have no
hair.”

Mitch and Gunter groaned. Christa and her
mother looked astonished.

“Do you know this for a fact, young man?”
Caroline asked.

“It’s true!” Mouse declared earnestly. “Highly
evolved alien species don’t have hair. They don’t need it, because they evolved
with clothes. Have you seen those alien autopsy films? No hair.”

They started toward the FBI helicopter
laughing and groaning, as Mouse proceeded to explain in excruciating detail,
his theory linking baldness and extra terrestrials.

Mitch hurried past the dozens of
police cars encircling the congress building, flashing his presidential
clearance at the police outside and the FBI agents inside. Even at the
entrance, there was a strange, somber tone to the place, as confused staff and
officials were mustered by quiet, relentless FBI agents who now controlled
every inch of the building.

The congressional security unit had been
disarmed by the FBI as a precaution, at least until the purge was complete. Inside
the senate chamber, confused senators stood in two lines, one leading to
Christa, the other to her mother. One by one, the senators were brought before
the two women who spent a minute with each, sending them either to the left and
arrest, or to the right and freedom.

Caroline had already given the President
and Vice President clean bills of health, then soon after the President had
been briefed, he reinstated her as NSO Director and authorized the FBI to purge
congress. Supreme Court warrants had been slower in coming, but eventually the
final legal hurdles were overcome. Once authorized, Lamar had moved swiftly,
taking control of the congress in under thirty minutes.

Lamar and his staff tried taking statements
from the small number of ashen faced senators under guard, but their
conditioning prevented them from answering while Senator Fraser, the only free
willed member of the group, chose to remain resolutely silent. Lamar nodded to
two armed FBI agents, who handcuffed Senator Fraser, and led him to the door. The
senator saw Mitch standing there and for a moment they stood face to face, the
senator simmering with anger.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Fraser
snarled. “You’ve endangered the security of this entire country.”

“More guns won’t make us safer, senator, but
putting a sick son of a bitch like you away will.”

Senator Fraser gave him an angry look as
FBI agents bustled him away, then Mitch joined Mouse and Gunter at the back of
the Senate Chamber. They both looked relaxed watching proceedings, Gunter with
his arm in a sling and the latest copy of the Wall Street Journal folded on his
lap, Mouse with a fresh bandage around his head, an iced doughnut in one hand
and a steaming coffee in the other. He dunked the doughnut and bit into it
contently, as if watching his favorite TV show.

Mitch glanced at the paper folded under Gunter’s
good hand. “How’d it go?”

Gunter shook his head slowly. “I took a
bath, but, I have a lot of tapes to listen to.” He smiled, certain he would be
financially ahead in no time. “How about the Supreme Court, are they still
hedging?”

“Nope,” Mitch said as he rocked back on his
chair, placing his feet on a senator’s desk. “After my testimony this morning,
they’re issuing warrants for anyone mentioned in EB’s download. Defense
Department, intelligence community, arms industry, you name it. It’s going to
shake the entire military industrial complex to its core.”

“That is good.” Gunter nodded approvingly. “Lamar
told us Ackerman was arrested by Arizona State Police this morning, and most of
the people working at the Sincom base are now in jail.”

“Still a few runners,” Mouse added, “But
they won’t get far.”

“It’s going to be a mess to sort out,”
Mitch said. “How are the girls doing?”

“Batting a thousand,” Mouse said with an
approving nod.

I’ll have you know Mr
Mitchell
,
Caroline’s thought appeared in Mitch’s mind with astonishing clarity and a
tinge of humor,
that I am a woman, not a girl!

“Jeez!” He sat up suddenly, almost falling
off his chair. Caroline was at least thirty feet away and could not possibly
have heard his comment.

“What?” Gunter asked confused, unaware of
the telepathic contact.

Caroline had not turned to face Mitch. She
appeared to be focused on the mystified senator standing in front of her.

But you are right on
one count,
another of Caroline’s thoughts
appeared in his mind,
Senator Fraser is a son of a bitch.

Mitch grinned. “This is too spooky.”

Mouse leaned toward Mitch. “The FBI say
they’ll have a testing machine assembled by the end of the month, something
that can identify conditioning. Kind of like a lie detector, only based on the
brain’s alpha waves. The design was in the stuff EB downloaded to them. Right
now, all we’ve got is Christa and her mom.”