Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (17 page)

Trevor stopped when his father vented a frustrated grunt and kicked a cardboard box beside the desk hard enough to impale it with his wingtip shoe. A tiny rain of leaflets fluttered out — probably more useless pro-Astral propaganda.

“I’m sorry,” he said, fighting for control.

Trevor blinked. “No problem.” But it was strange, all right. His father prided himself on unfettered calm, and Trevor could count on one hand the times he’d seen him lose emotional control.

“It’s this banquet. This fucking banquet. Why do we have to have it
tonight?
You know about this thing with your stepmother?”

Trevor nodded slowly.

“It’s all a big misunderstanding. She’s always using my connection to grab shows for her juke because the net is … well, you know how it’s been. Problems with the wires or something. Which is why I’ve been on Raj to find a way around the issues with the city net, at least for connections in the house.”

Trevor said nothing. That seemed wrong, too. After two years, you’d think that intergalactic travelers who’d built the pyramids could do some basic electrical repair. Or for that matter, properly secure data on a computer.

“She tripped an alarm or something — some bullshit security they have on this thing. But then she chooses
right now
to go off somewhere, and it looks bad because they think she did it on purpose and is running away.”

“Did what?”

“Something was accessed that shouldn’t have been. Nothing terribly important. I keep telling them it’s a mistake; that’s not like Piper to do something underhanded. But they … ” He trailed off then touched his temple. “Well, it’s hard to explain, but since I’m tuned in to their groupthink or whatever you want to call it, I don’t just get answers like talking to a normal person. I can
feel
their disbelief, as if I didn’t believe her myself.”

“Oh.”

“But I do believe her, Trevor. Or I mean, I would if she were here to tell me what I already know.”

“Sure.” Again, Trevor felt a new sense of familiarity in his father, reminding him that it had been missing before.

Meyer’s perfectly combed hair had come slightly askew after kicking the box. His tie had flapped out of his coat. But it was more than those simple bits of disorder that caused Trevor to wonder. His father looked momentarily lost.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. But the
last
damned thing I want to do tonight is have dinner with a bunch of ambassadors.”

“The other viceroys?”

Meyer shook his head. “Just ambassadors.”

“Couldn’t it be handled over Skype or something?”

“Banquets like this are never to talk business, Trevor. It’s a PR thing.”

“Why?”

“We’re still a human society. New power structures don’t change that. People have to believe in all of this. Believe in the system.”

Trevor resisted the urge to ask if he meant “believe it” instead of “believe
in
it.” So much of his father’s job as viceroy seemed like acting rather than politics. The new government and social infrastructure was all human, with the Astrals supposedly acting only as supervisors. But the visitors weren’t merely observers, and everyone knew it. Too many humans had been killed, and the old governments had been forcefully rebuked when they’d attempted nuclear mutiny. But the public image machine kept churning, spitting out
colonization-is-good-for-all-of-us
propaganda, broadcasting fancy dinners like tonight’s as the new and elegant norm. Trevor would have rolled his eyes if he hadn’t seen his father’s mastery of the public eye in the past, and his fervent belief that reality was simply whatever someone declared and repeated. Enough dinners with smiling human dignitaries broadcast to the population, and people would eventually believe all the lies.

“Sure,” Trevor said.

Meyer looked at the kicked box. He seemed baffled by his actions, as if unable to fathom why missing cufflinks had roiled his stress into a momentary loss of control.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, Trevor.” He smoothed his hair, retucking his tie.

“You said the Astrals were digging below the Apex. And that’s why the rebels tried to blow up the city with that plane.”

“Not exactly in that way, but yes, that’s what we think.”

“Why
are they digging?”

Meyer looked into Trevor’s eyes from across the room. He seemed to be warring with a decision. “I guess there’s no reason I can’t say,” he finally said. “There’s a structure underground here. Something that got buried by time.”

“And they have to
dig
to reach it?”

“That’s how you get below dirt, Trevor. You dig.”

“But they’re aliens.”

“There’s still dirt between them and the structure. And the Apex is on top of it anyway.”

“Why did they plant a giant glass pyramid on top of something if they meant to dig it up?”

“I don’t know. They’re building at
all
the capitals.”

“But
right on top
of a dig site?”

“I don’t know. Why does it matter?”

“What’s the structure underground?”

Meyer’s eyes had narrowed slightly, but he answered without hesitation. “A temple, I think.”

“But they’re being so slow.”

“They’re trying to find its door then search it carefully.”

Trevor felt less than satisfied. Each answer birthed ten more questions. What exactly was down there? What were the new monoliths for? Were the Astrals just digging to get at an old structure or digging around it for artifacts? The compulsion to keep asking was a horrible itch, but Trevor knew he had to pull back. His father could sense prying, and so far he was still in the realm of curiosity. If he connected the rest of the dots for his father, asking how a discovery at the dig site could possibly have attracted Piper’s attention and launched a citywide manhunt, Meyer’s demeanor might change from paternal to guarded — maybe suspicious. He’d been betrayed by one member of his family already, and his denial would only stretch so far if a second joined the first.

“Oh,” Trevor said. “Okay.”

His father’s eyes had hardened, his momentary weakness now gone. “Have you heard anything from Piper?”

Trevor fought the urge to swallow, knowing it might be misinterpreted. “No.”

“You’re sure? Not just
from
her, but
about
her? No idea where she might be?”

Trevor saw a Reptar’s vision of Terrence in his mind. He saw the police captain, talking about bad camera feeds near one of the churches. He saw Terrence in the flesh, revealing things he shouldn’t have known.

“No.”

Meyer met Trevor’s eyes. His fingers trailed along the desk as if in search. “Was there anything else then?”

Trevor swallowed. “No. I guess I’m good.”

“You came in for a book. Aren’t you going to look around for one?”

“I can download one. I just forgot.”

After a pregnant moment, Meyer nodded slowly. “Good.”

At the door, he called Trevor back.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“If Piper can’t make dinner, I’ll need you to be my second. The person I turn to as my right hand when the press asks questions.”

“Oh, sure,” Trevor said, feeling a bit blindsided.

“Because you
are
my right hand. My best man. And I know you’ll stand beside me no matter what.”

“Sure, Dad.”

Meyer nodded. “Then I’ll see you in a bit.”

Trevor walked back down the length of the rear hallway, the clacking of his hard-soled shoes echoing off the stone floor. He needed to prepare for dinner, and an evening as the viceroy’s right hand.

His father’s greatest ally, whether he liked it or not.

C
HAPTER
20

Benjamin shuffled the windows on his largest monitor, dragging them to adjacent screens, trying to make sense of it all. Nothing quite fit — but in a maddening almost-there sort of way, something was definitely about to break the surface.

He looked from window to window. From screen to screen. Limitations in the public network had become an even bigger problem than restrictions in the underground web he used to communicate with the other rebel labs worldwide and the church in Heaven’s Veil.
That
network might (might!) be free and secure, though Benjamin still had his doubts. But regardless, Wikipedia was on the public net, not the private one. As were conspiracy blogs, with millions upon millions of pages packed with the puzzle pieces Benjamin needed. And who controlled the public net, at least until Cameron could get into Heaven’s Veil and plant the virus? Astrals, of course.

And the Astrals, unsurprisingly, were stingy about the alien-related information they allowed through their filter.

It shouldn’t have mattered. Benjamin knew most of this by heart and had untold terabytes of data culled from a lifetime of paranormal and extraterrestrial research. He knew history better than most historians — the
real
history, he often thought, rather than the official bullshit. He had his photos and videos, materials traded with others through the years. A smart and properly paranoid person didn’t rely on the Internet to answer his questions; Benjamin made copies and backed them up. But even his local records didn’t tell the whole story. Since the occupation, every amateur UFO researcher had become a serious investigator. Every conspiracy theorist, duly vindicated, had sprung into action. But with the worldwide network neutered, there was no way to share and parse new research. He had all the old information in the world, but little of the new. It was frustrating.

That’s part of what Cameron had set out to fix. The Canned Heat virus, properly unleashed, should give Benjamin and his prepared colleagues a cache from which to grab handfuls of unrestricted data as fast as they could. They wouldn’t get anywhere near all of it unless new Internet activity had been surprisingly light or the Astrals proved to be surprisingly inept at plugging the hole Cameron was about to drill, but they’d get enough. They’d get the most important sectors. The story behind the story. Then, maybe, this puzzle would begin to make sense.

Something with the Templars begged attention, for instance.

Benjamin knew the basics. He knew about the Rose Stone in Hertfordshire. He’d even been into the artificial cave below its original position. He had archive photos of the carvings inside that cave, and his own photos, samples, and rubbings. But what else might have been discovered? Were people still heading into Royston Cave, or was it too far into lawless outlands? Were there wild barrens overseas like there were here? Did shuttles guard the cave? A deep hunch swore it was important.

But Benjamin didn’t think Astral shuttles would guard Royston Cave. It was, he thought, entirely possible that the aliens didn’t even know the cave was there. It had been dug a millennium ago, well after the last evidence of a widespread alien occupation. And although the Astrals had proved they could scrape the surface of human thoughts, they didn’t seem to understand the electronic networks at all. They weren’t stupid; they knew what those networks were and had cut them on arrival. But they’d reactivated them just as suddenly, their only known attempts to access having proved no more skilled than any user who sat down in front of a terminal. In their shoes, confronting an unknown as baffling to Astrals as their technologies had always been to humans, Benjamin supposed he’d have put native experts on the case. But seeing as the Astrals wouldn’t know what they were looking for in this foreign soup of electronic information, it seemed entirely possible that nobody — alien
or
human — had stumbled across information about an obscure English cave. Or had any idea what it might mean.

Even Benjamin didn’t know what it meant — to either the old story or the one currently unfolding. But the Templar carvings at Royston had always been considered a kind of codex — and if Benjamin’s hunches were right, that codex might be needed to decode something after all.

Now … as to what that something might be? It was impossible to tell.

He didn’t even know what to ask. Nobody did. But the Knights Templar had been the Benjamin Bannisters of their day, and there was plenty in biblical times — even during the Crusades — that smelled extraterrestrial to Benjamin. If the Templars had known something about that last occupation, there were only so many ways they’d have chosen to pass that information along to those who’d need it in the future. In code, surely.

A loud rumbling rolled in from outside. Benjamin looked down and saw the water ripple in his glass. There had been a few rumbles minutes ago, but he’d been too focused to pay them much mind. Earthquakes, perhaps, if those happened in Utah.

There was a louder noise. Sharper, rawer. Not deep like the others, but tinged with treble notes.

Ivan burst into the office, his eyes wider than usual. It took Benjamin a moment to realize what was different, but then it hit him: even during the capital attacks, he’d never seen the hard man frightened.

“Benjamin! Get out here!”

“Where? What’s going on?”

Another sound outside — this one deadly similar to a distant explosion.

“Just come!”