Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (73 page)

“Mr. Tanning, all I need to know is can you fire them?” Thomas demanded simply.

“Can we fire them? Of course we can fire them! It’s what happens after that I’m concerned with.”

“Can you hit a target with them then?”

Tanning sighed. “Yes. Assuming we can account for magnetic flux, we can hit a target. The question is whether we turn this entire facility into a crater in the process or not.”

Thomas snorted, looking around calmly. Finally he glanced back. “Begin firing preparations.”

Tanning stared as the general walked away, then numbly staggered back to his control room.

“Sir? What are we doing?”

Tanning stared at his colleague, hoping that he didn’t look too horrified by what he was about to say, and finally willed his mouth to move.

“Stand by to fire.”

Gaia looked over the thoughts running through the minds of the nearly panicked men who were now following the orders of the general. There was
something noble about being totally terrified, nearly to the point of doing something humiliating with your various bodily functions, and yet still proceeding to do whatever it was that was scaring you in the first place
.

Noble, but she didn’t have time to dwell on that aspect of humanity at the moment
.

Gaia was well aware of everything the humans knew about themselves, and she even knew a few things they didn’t, including some speculations about how her own physiology worked. Humanity stored their memories in two known mechanisms, and she speculated a third yet unknown one. She knew for herself that she also used two, at least, but didn’t have any data that might indicate a third as of yet
.

“I wonder if that might be forthcoming, should we fail?”

She pushed such morbid ideas aside, thoughts still meandering slightly as she considered the differences and similarities between herself and humans
.

Humans had active and passive thought storages, as did she. For a human the passive storage was in the chemical links in their brains; for her it seemed that she could store a great deal of information in the gravity well of the planet itself. Active thought processes, for humans, were in the neural-electric impulses that shot around the brain, and for herself it was in the geomagnetic field of the entire planet
.

That meant that she had some control over the very thing the people working here were trying to predict
.

Gaia centered her thoughts, a practice learned from uncountable thousands of meditation masters worldwide, and slowly began to stop thinking around the base in New Mexico
.

“Holy . . .”

“What is it, Greg?”

“I don’t know, John, but check the magnetic readings.”

The technician walked over and glanced at the screen before double taking and having his eyes bug out. “Something has to be wrong with your gear.”

“I checked. I swear I checked,” his partner protested. “Even the portable stuff says the same thing. The local field is almost neutralizing itself.”

“This is impossible.”

“This is a damn miracle. What’s the clock on the firing sequence?”

John double-checked. “The clock is at thirty seconds and counting.”

“Do you believe in God?” Greg asked. “Because I think he may have just made an appearance.”

“God, the devil, or lady luck . . . If this works, we’ll owe whoever pulled it off one hell of a solid.”

“Amen.”

God
.

Goddess
.

Gaia
.

She didn’t know what she was, so the conversation she monitored vaguely in the background as she focused her thoughts away amused her more than anything. She was a citizen of the world, and that would be enough. They did not owe her a solid, or anything else, because she was just trying to do her part to save her own life, but the thought was vaguely comforting
.

The focus it took to push her thoughts away from the facility, to deaden the electromagnetic flux that was an integral part of the living world they inhabited, was almost exhausting. It was a sensation, she had to admit, she had never before experienced
.

Of course, this was the first time she’d ever quite attempted something to quite this level. The closest she’d ever come before was accidentally blacking out the East Coast in a fit of pique that still was rather embarrassing to recall
.

“Everything is a learning experience,”
Gaia supposed as she continued to direct her thoughts away from the facility in New Mexico
. “
The original philosophers were right on that count. Now, if only I can go on learning . . .”

The countdown reached zero, and one very long gun under the command and control of the Earth opened fire.

Shockingly, for those stationed in New Mexico and who were aware of what was coming, nothing exploded.

Nothing local, at least.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT