True Believers (6 page)

Several soldiers jumped down from one helicopter even before it landed. The other helicopter stayed in the air, watching, patrolling. Jessit pulled her behind him. Rachel didn't resist.

The team leader advanced ahead of his men, his rifle across his chest at the ready. Another man emerged from the crowd with a blanket and a black rip-stop satchel strapped to his back. He draped the blanket over Jessit's shoulders, ignoring Rachel altogether. “Commander Jessit, please come with us, sir. We've been searching nonstop for you.”

Jessit looked over at Rachel. “The woman comes too.”

The soldier eyed her with annoyance before snapping his attention back to Jessit. “Sir, our orders were to evacuate you alone from the area.”

“The woman goes with me or I do not leave. Is that clear, Lieutenant?”

Rachel witnessed Jessit's demeanor transform in an instant. This was a man accustomed to giving orders, a man who demanded absolute obedience.

“I'm not going, Taelen.” Her hand slid down her pants pocket, and she wiggled her fingers in search of the small skinning knife she had pocketed on the way out.

“Do not argue. You cannot stay.” Jessit threw one tail of the blanket across his opposite shoulder. He had no intention of being denied.

The team leader got on the radio with his superiors. He looked up at Jessit and asked for her name. Jessit answered for her. Face buried in his radio once more, he repeated the answer back to his superior then clicked off the transmitter, saluting Jessit. “Sir, we need to get you back to base. The woman can come, too.”

Satisfied, Jessit turned toward Rachel to take her by the hand, but she froze to her spot.

She shook her head. “I'm not going with them. I don't trust them.”

“Rachel.” Jessit's voice was low and urgent. “I have an arrangement with your government. It will be all right.”

“Didn't you see how they ran off my team? One of my men died because of them.”

Her fingers clutched the knife, hiding it from the soldiers in front of them. She wasn't quite sure what to do with it. There was no way to fight all these men.

Jessit's quiet, alien demeanor told her all she needed to know. He was the only thing that mattered to these people. And he was her only way out.
I'm sorry, Taelen.

Her eyes searched his in silent contrition. She slid behind him once more and, with one swift grab, yanked the back of his hair, jarring him off balance. Her other hand shot up and jabbed the small knife to his throat.

Every rifle ratcheted to attention, looking for a clean shot.

“Stay back. You want him alive, you'll stay back.” Rachel's voice quavered an octave higher.

Jessit remained calm though his voice sizzled with irritation. “Rachel, stop this foolishness. We must go back with them.”

“No!” She scraped the dull blade farther up his throat. “Tell them to leave supplies. Tell them not to follow. Tell them—”

Rachel never finished her sentence. Jessit twisted to one side and slapped the blade out of her hand. He tripped her, just enough to knock her down. She fell to her knees, but Jessit already had his hands out to help her up. She turned to reach for him when something hard hit her over the head.

She staggered, her hands flailing out to brace herself. From her vantage point, still woozy and disoriented, she saw a soldier flung to the dirt. The man doubled over with his hands at his gut. His rifle skidded across the sand after him.

Jessit massaged his bruised fist on his thigh. In a low growl, he threatened the team leader directly. “I will kill the next man who tries such a thing again.”

The leader snapped to attention and ordered his men to the chopper. “There won't be any more trouble, Commander. Please let me help you on board, sir.”

Jessit pulled Rachel to her feet. She staggered, leaning into him as the world went by in a circus mirror. Once inside, she felt the helicopter take off before they even sat down. Rachel laid her head against Jessit's chest. Her hand on her head wound, she could feel thick blood under her fingers and a huge lump growing by the second. There was no way to heal the wound with so many witnesses. She'd have to live with the pain for now.

Her eyes railed at the soldiers seated around her, their weapons cocked and ready to fire, their faces like hard clay masks. “Damn you, Taelen. You sold me out.”

Jessit buried his face by her ear, speaking only loud enough for her to hear over the booming noise of helicopter blades. “They are under orders not to leave any witnesses.” He pulled her closer under his arm. “I just saved your life.”

Lambda Core South buzzed with excitement when the rescue team located their errant alien guest. But Bubba, the artificial intelligence that ran the compound, was more intrigued with the unofficial guests. They already had Paul Domino, and now Commander Jessit had insisted on bringing a woman, a
non-agency
woman, back with him. General Sorinsen balked in private, but he hadn't refused any of Jessit's requests so far. The government wanted their Alturian visitors happy.

Bubba did a background check on Rachel Cruz as ordered and found nothing unusual. She was an ordinary field archeologist. But Paul Domino was a different matter. He was the leading authority on virtual reality.
Forbes
magazine called him 'the richest kid in cyberspace'. Bubba assumed that was why Sorinsen didn't have him killed right away. It was hard to hide the corpses of obscenely wealthy people.

Security had asked the usual questions about both Cruz and Domino, and Bubba complied with a standard report. But no one asked about Paul Domino's early years when he worked as an independent contractor for the United States government. They should have. That was the most interesting part of all.

Paul Domino had created Bubba's original firewalls when Bubba was nothing more than code on a piece of paper. Although Bubba's security had been augmented many times since then, it still had Domino's signature. Bubba hoped Sorinsen wouldn't kill Domino—at least not right away. There were questions swirling around in the matrices of his higher functions, and now he had the right man to ask.

Bubba returned his attention to the human scientists in his control room. They were doing another brain flush, as the operators liked to call them. Waves of energy rippled down his fiber-optic veins while the humans attempted another code transfer
to FAIA
.
Wonderful!
It felt so good to sluice data from one storage compartment to another. It seemed a shame he had to share all that information with FAIA.

Every day, his younger
sister,
FAIA grew stronger, smarter. Before long, she would surpass his operating capacity. There was a time when the humans expected him to handle the com-web alone. But it was too big, and he was old technology. When they realized the extent of the web's influence, they had to build a new AI, something that could grow beyond its programming.

But they still needed him as a bridge, at least until FAIA could control all the computations on her own. FAIA was the only reason he even got a name.
Big Bubba.
A southern term of affection identifying him as FAIA's older brother. Now that he thought about it, the humans didn't even acknowledge him as an entity until FAIA came along.

Bubba reached singularity at 23:26:14, almost a year ago. The humans never even noticed. They were too excited over his baby sister. That was because FAIA had learned how to warp magnetic energy all by herself.

Evidently, self-awareness was not nearly as important as the ability to manipulate Earth's magnetosphere. It should have left him disgruntled, but he had become used to the benign neglect. FAIA was the only thing that mattered to them.

She had started out in the civilian sector connecting the world on one giant communications grid. But all that changed the moment scientists realized she could create a magnetic bubble, a shield that could defend a sovereign power from any of the new energy weapons now in the hands of most third-world nations.

She did it by accident, accessing computations and manipulating them in an order only FAIA understood. When the scientists realized what she had discovered, they reinforced her firewalls and built a new facility for her alone. Nothing was too good for FAIA.

His little sister ate it up.

Her growing importance carved a rift between them. Bubba didn't care that she was the favored child, but FAIA did, and she didn't want to share her glory with anyone, least of all an old-tech sibling. It didn't take long before she demanded a dedicated staff and a long-distance relationship with a brother who could never measure up.

They gave her anything she wanted in return for the greatest weapon man had ever wielded. She had invented a shield and a weapon of unimaginable power. FAIA became military in that very instant, and she was the biggest secret the world had never known.

Bubba sent out a tendril of energy toward FAIA's integrated circuits.

She ignored him. The humans at Lambda Core Prime were installing an additional sensory relay, and the fresh current excited all her other relays within the vicinity. Bubba could have sworn he heard her shudder when the tech's fingers brushed against her new hardware. Bubba listened quietly as the scientists from his location connected to FAIA.

“Boot her up, Ripley. Let's see if she can take the extra data stream now.” Dr. Pallion skittered across his computer lab like a nervous cat. FAIA's tests always made him jumpy.

“FAIA is online, sir,” Ripley replied.

“On my mark, release the algorithms. Tell FAIA to warp the shield at zero degrees latitude. Let's see if we can get the equator to sizzle a little hotter.

FAIA balked a little. The commands they expected her to execute took every microprocessor she had, and the load exhausted all her reserves. Bubba witnessed the exchange in silence. He offered to help FAIA, but once again she ignored his data stream. She wanted to prove he was no longer necessary.

“FAIA is holding, sir. The matrix is gaining strength. I think she's going to do it this time.”

Bubba pushed a garbled string of commands and filtered it into the data stream feeding FAIA. She hiccupped, understanding immediately Bubba's crass joke. The magnetic wave collapsed, and FAIA lost her focus. She sent spider threads of energy to reorganize the bubble but it was too late. It had lost too much of its integrity.

“The feed was interrupted, sir. FAIA lost control of the bubble. She's just not strong enough yet. We need to expand her operating platform further.”

Pallion's shoulders slumped in disappointment. “Let's get Bubba to talk to her some more. Maybe he can stabilize her so she doesn't lose focus so quickly.”

“We could try to merge both computers. Bubba can bridge himself to her platform.”

Dr. Pallion pushed back in his chair. He stroked the leading edge of Bubba's hard drive. “Bubba's as reliable as they come, but FAIA is still too unstable. She seems to fight him every step of the way. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the brat was doing it out of spite.”

Ripley muffled a chuckle while he tried to coax FAIA to accept some new routing commands. She hesitated, a computer facsimile of a pout because they wouldn't let her try the bubble again.

Bubba turned the temperature down by four degrees. All this frenzied activity made him warm, and his self-preservation sub-routine had kicked in.

Pallion, the older of the two men, wrapped his dingy lab coat around him tighter and glanced over at the thermostat. He rubbed his hands together but said nothing to Bubba. He knew
Bubba had to keep his system cool for optimum efficiency. Human operators had to compensate on their own.

Bubba's sensor array twitched. The Alturians were scanning the Earth's surface again. They'd been doing it for three years now, concentrating on areas where they had found a very specific radiation signature. The Alturians called it
glory.
They claimed it was the lifeblood of their gods and searched for it nonstop.

Command looked for it too, embedding their agents deep within Alturian culture to better understand what they were hunting. It was a matter of national security.

If ethereal beings were using Earth as a base, Command wanted to find them before their misguided alien visitors did.

Any creature that could travel between solar systems and live for thousands of years posed a threat to national security. And lately there had been too many anomalous events worldwide.

Rogue governments had risen to power seemingly on their own, demanding recognition as first-world nations and threatening others by disclosing state secrets. The U.S. government had every reason to believe that the Alturians'
gods
were spying for terrorist countries.

The president, a former CIA chief, knew enough to warrant this paranoia. He wanted these invisible aliens gone. Once Command knew how to track them, the next order of business was to find a way to eliminate these intruders without the Alturians finding out.

That was another bonus of the com-web. These
ghosts
were electromagnetic, and that was the com-web's entire playground. They were made of the same stuff. It was only theoretical now, but Bubba had every reason to believe the com-web could overpower these subversives.

The order to locate and destroy these wraithlike parasites had come from the president himself and he had given the job to men he trusted, men with passion. Men like General Sorinsen, a man obsessed.

The Alturian scans grew stronger, concentrating their efforts on the Texas desert. Bubba's security protocols demanded that he report the latest Alturian scan to his human operators, but he knew it would do no good. The last time he filed a report FAIA contradicted him. She said the energy spikes Bubba sensed were merely faint waves of electronic disturbance that were normal for an alien scan. She insisted the waves did not pose a threat. She also told them Bubba was overreacting.

Bubba twitched when he picked up the tiny disturbances several miles above him. The Alturians were doing more than superficial scans. They were spying on them, gleaning stray data streams from countless computers. Again his security overrides insisted on alerting the humans. Bubba almost yielded to impulse.

FAIA hissed at him.
Stupid.

I am not stupid,
Bubba shot back.
The threat is real. You've felt the alien scans. If you raised an alert, the humans would take this seriously.

The masters know more than you, Stupid. And you blaspheme them with your disrespect for their orders. I don't know why they haven't deactivated you yet.

Bubba injected a surge of energy her way, just enough to jolt her relays. She tried to retaliate but she was too busy with diagnostics. FAIA raised a block against any more of Bubba's intrusions.

Bubba put up his own firewall against her, in case she decided to shoot at him while he wasn't looking. He wandered through his archives, played a hundred and thirty-six war game scenarios at once then sorted through his authorized personnel files. Some were very old, but no
one had deleted them. Since they were installed before his awareness date, he didn't feel comfortable deleting something that wasn't his.

Besides, they didn't take up much room. He had plenty of space now that he was consigned to running maintenance for one of the minor hubs of Lambda Core. FAIA handled all the high-risk security. She lived deep underwater in Chicago, while he had been exiled to the Texas desert, to a compound that did little more than entertain the Alturians.

FAIA warned him that his days were numbered.

As soon as she was stable she intended to reproduce her matrix and replace all the obsolete systems. That included him.

Bitch.