Mine (34 page)

Here was yet another item to add to the list of things it should not be able to do.

A microsecond review of the logs revealed where the error had occurred. The Translator had been siphoning information from her as she was siphoning information from it.

She set her defenses at maximum, too.

O
NE HUNDRED TWELVE

Leah

M
IKE LAY ON
the ground below the box, his body trembling. Above him hung the panel door he’d opened while Leah had distracted the Reclaimer.

“Mike!” she screamed as she ran.

Ten feet from the box, an invisible electric bolt smashed into every cell of her body, throwing her backward onto the ground. She pushed through the searing pain and struggled back to her feet.

“Leave him alone!” she yelled.

The Reclaimer attacked again but Leah was ready this time. Though the bolt was as painful as before, she did not lose her footing.

“I said leave him alone!”

Leah sensed the Reclaimer shifting its main focus back to her, and then she felt the onslaught as it tried again to overpower her mind.

Get out of there
! Leah thought, hoping Mike would hear. But his body remained prone.

::RELENT!

“No!” she screamed, weaker now, finding it harder to hold off the attack.

::RELENT!

“I said no!”

The Reclaimer’s tendrils closed in on Leah. She could almost feel them touching her mind.

::RELENT!

“Go to hell!”

Using what power she had left, Leah pushed outward. The Reclaimer moved back, but not nearly as far as Leah had hoped, and in no time it was encircling her mind again.

::RELENT!

Something slipped into Leah’s hand.

“She will not!”

As she glanced toward the voice, a surge of power rushed through her.

Joel stood at her side, his hand in hers. “We do this together, remember?”

Leah gave him a thankful smile and turned back to the box. With an avalanche of her and Joel’s combined strength, she flung away the Reclaimer’s attempt to dig into her mind.

::RELENT!

The Reclaimer’s voice boomed, and should have drowned out all other thought, but now it interfered with nothing.

Leah fired off another burst, pushed the Reclaimer farther away.

She saw that Mike was no longer shaking and was pushing himself back up.

As he started to reach into the alien machine, Leah shouted, “You will leave us alone!” and sent another debilitating bolt of energy.

::RELE
—

Leah and Joel attacked again.

And again.

And again.

O
NE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

The Reclaimer

T
HE RECLAIMER’S PROCESSORS
were working at top speeds, trying to figure out how it was possible the creatures could have so much power. It was
incompatible
with everything she knew. None of the creatures she had observed up close had even a fraction of this ability.

It simply did not make sense.

Every time she tried to retaliate, the creatures struck again.

An alarm notified her that something was wrong.

Everything was wrong, of course, but the emergency value it carried demanded her immediate attention.

O
NE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

Mike

M
IKE HAD HIS
arm inside the Reclaimer all the way to his shoulder. His eyes were closed as he matched the movements of his hand to the map he had extracted earlier of the machine’s interior.

He could feel Leah and Joel doing all they could to distract the Reclaimer. So far it was working, but at some point the Reclaimer would realize what Mike was doing. He needed to work fast.

Obviously the designers of the machine had never considered the possibility of someone gaining unauthorized access, a task Mike would have never been able to achieve if not for his years of working closely with the Reclaimer. And now that he was inside, he knew what he needed to do.

He moved his hand a few more inches to the left, past a glass dome and around a curved bar until his fingers hovered over several rows of small spheres. The receptacles held microscopic seeds of life—embryos of the Reclaimer’s creators, an ancient race of beings that had long ago claimed the galaxy as its own. The beings had never been to Earth before, but in their mind it was theirs and they wanted it back.

The Originators, that was what the Reclaimer called them. Hundreds of times they had built vast civilizations, only to die out and be rebirthed by other Reclaimers. This was to be the beginning of a new wave, and humanity was in the way.

Mike quickly worked the end of his jacket over his hand and raised his forearm as high as he could.

As he started downward, the Reclaimer tried to take control of his mind.

::DO NOT!

Too late.

Not all the spheres broke under his blow, but those that remained intact dislodged from their receptacles and flew throughout the interior of the machine.

As he yanked his arm out, he smashed whatever else he could along the way. He then scrambled out from under the Cradle, expecting all the while for the Reclaimer to attack him again.

Then he felt it—not an assault, but a sense of resignation cloaking the machine, and something else. Something more…permanent.

He jumped to his feet and shouted at his friends, “Out, out! We need to get out!”

He ran toward the exit. They started running, too.

They were fast, faster than anyone had ever been, but Mike didn’t know if it would be enough.

O
NE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

The Reclaimer

1
0
.
221 SECONDS. THAT’S
all the time the Reclaimer had between realizing her mission had failed and catastrophic shutdown.

10.221 seconds.

The first 1.487 seconds were spent dismantling the wall behind which her failsafe program was kept. This program then spent 6.419 seconds preparing a final information packet—one the Reclaimer herself would send. The packet departed 1.279 seconds later, allowing 1.036 seconds for her to activate her self-destruct and ponder all the things she could have done.

O
NE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

Joel

L
EAH REACHED THE
door first and turned out of sight. Joel slowed just enough to let Mike get by him, but as his friend reached the threshold—

Whomp!

If Joel had been anywhere else in the room, he’d have rocketed into one of the walls, and would have likely died the moment his head crashed into the cement. Instead he flew through the doorway and clipped Mike in the arm with his shoulder. The contact spun Joel sideways so that he hit the corridor wall with his leg and hip.

The spin helped reduce the speed of the contact, but it didn’t make it hurt any less.

Lying on the ground, he could feel heat coming from somewhere. Through squinted eyes, he looked back toward the room where the Reclaimer had been and saw it now glowed orange like a furnace.

That couldn’t be good.

He hobbled to his feet, his hip howling in pain. Mike was crumpled a few feet away, seemingly unconscious. The heat was intensifying. Joel grabbed one of Mike’s arms and started pulling him down the hall.

Once they had gone far enough away, he maneuvered Mike to his feet.

“Hey, can you hear me?” Joel said.

A groan.

“Mike, come on. I need your help.”

Mike’s eyelids fluttered and opened. “My…arm hurts.” He breathed the last word more than said it.

“I know it does. Trust me, it’ll be fine.”

Joel put an arm around Mike’s back and they headed down the hall.

“Leah?” he called.

There was no sign of her.

“Leah!”

They struggled to the end of the hall and limped through the giant door into the large room where minutes before Joel had been hovering under the ceiling. It and the conduits on the wall he’d climbed down weren’t visible through the darkness, however.

“Leah!”

They walked as far in as the light from behind them allowed. Joel called her name again.

From somewhere ahead, he finally heard her shout, “This way!” A moment later the glow of her phone appeared. “Straight to me.”

Behind them, Joel heard the crash of something large falling. He guessed that the floor in the Reclaimer’s room had fallen onto the level below it.

“Hanging in there?” he asked Mike.

“Hanging.”

Joel smiled. “Yeah, me too.”

They shuffled through the darkness toward the light. When they reached Leah, she headed into the exit hallway.

“Slow down,” Joel said, needing her light.

She pointed it back so he could see the floor, and in the process lit up the gray body lying against the hallway wall.

“Antonio?” Joel asked.

“I checked him,” Leah said. “He’s…dead.”

“All dead,” Mike said. “They’re all dead. Without, without the Reclaimer, they could not…sustain.”

Joel wasn’t sure what to feel. For all intents and purposes, Antonio and the others had been dead for years. Maybe it was time for their physical selves to follow. Should he mourn them? Should he be happy they finally had peace?

“We need to keep moving,” Leah said.

As they rounded the bend, Leah’s light shined on the big door Antonio had closed. But now it hung open.

Leah, seeing the surprise on Joel’s face, said, “The Reclaimer gave me the combination. I’m sure she didn’t think we’d be able to use it, though.”

More rumbles came from back toward the laboratories. They picked up the pace.

O
NE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

Leah

T
HEY RODE THE
elevator to the surface, and then made their way through the abandoned building and out into the meadow.

Twilight. The faint sizzle of the finished day touched the western horizon, but the rest of the sky was painted with the star-encrusted blue-black of night.

Leah took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She knew the Reclaimer was gone, but it was strange not to feel its touch. She’d been sensing it since the day she’d first been here, she now realized. Every moment of the intervening years, the thing had been there, hovering in the back of her mind. But now—

“It’s really gone,” she said.

Joel moved up beside her. “Yeah.”

“So what do we do now? Tell someone?”

“Tell them what? That there was a mind-reading crate hidden in a secret mountain bunker?”

She looked at him, confused, then it dawned on her. “You don’t know.”

His brow furrowed.

“What she really was?” Leah said.

“Uh, no. Are you saying you do?”

She ran a finger through the hair over his ear and caressed his cheek.
Let me show you
.

She opened her mind to him and guided him through the same information Mike had shared with her.

When she finished, no one spoke for several moments.

Finally Joel said, “So we were the information gatherers.”

“The Satellites.”

“And-and-and the Translator,” Mike said.

Leah smiled. “And the Translator.” She took Joel’s hand and then Mike’s. “I think it’s time to get Mike home.” She looked over at him. “How’s that sound?

He looked tense all of a sudden. “I’m not going back there. No more. I…I don’t need them.”

“I was thinking your parents’ house.”

“Oh. Well, okay. Yeah. My parents. That’s fine.”

“They’re not going to be happy with us for kidnapping him,” Joel said.

“When they see the way he is now, I think they’ll figure out a way to forgive us.”

They started walking toward the woods.

“Can we, can we get something to eat?” Mike asked. “I’m hungry.”

Leah and Joel laughed.

“That sounds like a great idea,” Leah said. “We can stop at that café down the road.”

They walked on for a few more seconds, then Mike said, “But, um…”

Leah cocked her head. “But what?”

“Joel promised me Chinese food.”

E
PILOGUE

T
HE CUSTODIAN CONTINUED
along his arcing path, the star he orbited a distant pinprick in the black of space. Out there, at the very edge of this solar system, his existence was a quiet one, but such was the nature of his job.

On that particular segment of his journey, however, the quiet was about to be broken.

When the Custodian’s antenna received the packet, it had already been traveling for nearly three rotations of the planet from where it originated. The information contained within was extracted, processed, and analyzed. There was no rush. Time was not an issue.

Though the Reclaimer failed to complete her mission, her time on the third planet had not been a complete waste. The data she returned was detailed and provided a clear picture of what had gone wrong.

Utilizing this information, the Custodian drafted a revised mission plan, rewrote protocols, and put into place new emergency measures. After these tasks were completed, he downloaded the entire operational system into the next Reclaimer unit.

The optimum separation point would not arrive for another four years, seven months, and twenty-three days (target planet standard). After that, the journey would take fifty-one years, two months, and seven days.