Ukiah - Alien Taste Part 20

"Taking her would have triggered almost as many alarms as they're triggering now."

He shook a finger to indicate time was an important point. "If the target date was five years out, then a kidnapping and release wouldn't damage things horribly. It would have been smoothed over and forgotten. But if the target date is now, they couldn't grab her and hold her. They can do it with the FBI agents, because there's no real connection between the agents and Haze's company. It's relatively safe for their plans to take the agents."

"And there is a sense of desperation to this. Like everything is coming to a head. Things have gone wrong for them, and they're scrambling."

"So, has the company finished any projects lately, something they're about to s.h.i.+p or release?"

"Just one, but I doubt that would invoke any interest in a gang of covert terrorists. It's not even top-secret.""What is it?"

She picked up the remote, flicked on the television, and punched in a number. The NASA channel came up, showing the desolate red Mars landscape, moving by ever so slowly. "They built the Mars Rover."

Tribot, the company Doctor Janet Haze had worked for, was housed in an una.s.suming yellow brick three-story building between Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard in Oakland. Indigo pressed the buzzer on the street entrance and talked to a receptionist over the attached intercom before the door unlocked with a thunk.

The receptionist was young, pretty, and fl.u.s.tered. "Special Agent Zheng, we weren't expecting the FBI today. Who should I tell that you're waiting? Mr. Lang again?"

Indigo shook her head. "We would like to see someone familiar with the Mars Rover."

Startled, the receptionist picked up her phone, dialing a quick three-digit extension. She swung in her chair so her back was to them and spoke quietly into her headset. Still Ukiah heard. "Mr. Lang, Special Agent Zheng is out here wanting to see someone about the Mars Rover. The Rover crew is all in the War Room. Should I send them down there? I don't know. Yes, sir." She turned back and smiled. "Mr. Lang says you're to go down and see the Rover crew."

The receptionist gave them directions down to the War Room. Indigo apparently recognized the landmarks given because she nodded at certain points. As they hurried through the offices, Ukiah suddenly caught a familiar smell. He paused, sniffing, and comparing the faint scent to his great store of known odors.

The musky scent, he realized, belonged to an Ontongard. He patted his hip, rea.s.suring himself he was armed, then followed his nose through the maze of cubicles and offices. He found himself at the doorway of an inner core office. The reek of Ontongard made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

"What is it?" Indigo asked.

Ukiah leaned back to eye the nameplate beside the door. Sam Robb. "This was the office of Doctor Haze's boss, the Ontongard insider before Rennie killed him."

The room was a dark cubbyhole. Not a room people would fight to fill. It had not been cleared after Sam Robb's death, stocked full of papers, books, charts, graphs. Ukiah noted, however, that there were no personal items. No framed pictures. No posters or artwork hung on the wall. Nothing pleasing or odd sat on the desk, attracting the eye. When tracking missing persons, Ukiah found knickknacks and useless clutter to be the greatest clues into people's minds and habits. All the clues he normally looked for revealing the inner personality were missing.

"Did Robb's family come and clear out his office?" he asked Indigo.

"Robb didn't have family. No next of kin or emergency contact information was ever provided. It was one of the quirks of his death that kept the case open. We kept finding holes and outright lies in his employment records."

"How did he get work at a company that does top-secret projects?"

"That's what the FBI would like to know. Someone let him slip through, maybe for money."

Pack memory served up a disturbing alternative. "Or they were Ontongard too."

Indigo didn't answer, but her eyes went cold.

The War Room was a high-tech conference room. White boards hung on the walls with almostevery inch covered in techno-babble. Each person had their PDA linked to screens embedded into the top of the table, and computer gibberish scrolled up and down. An air of frantic activity clung to the twenty employees gathered in the room. Only one or two glanced up as Ukiah and Indigo entered.

One of them recognized Indigo. "Special Agent Zheng? This is not a good time."

"Doctor Elsie Janda," Indigo said to Ukiah. "She's now project leader on the Mars Rover project.

Doctor Janda, this is Ukiah Oregon. He's working as a consultant on the case." Indigo glanced about the room. "Is there something wrong with the Rover?"

The woman managed a weak smile. "We're trying to decide that right now. NASA called us about an hour ago. There was an unexplained course deviation. Nothing major, except that the Rover doesn't seem to be responding any more to their course corrections."

"So they've lost control of the Rover?"

The woman shook her head. "Lost control is too strong for the present situation. The onboard computers will go a long way to keep it from damaging itself. I'm sure we'll be able to correct the problem shortly."

Ukiah tilted his head to see a screen as the user scrolled through the lines and lines of code. The code reminded him of the sc.r.a.p of paper that had vanished from Doctor Haze's bedroom. He pulled out his own PDA and scribbled down a piece of his memory. "Excuse me, would this suggest anything to you?" He handed his PDA over to the project leader.

The woman frowned at it. "Well, the first are all modules of the Rover programming. I don't recognize the second set."

Ukiah took back his PDA. "This list was at Doctor Haze's place when she died. It's quite possible that she somehow sabotaged the Rover using this list."

"Janet?" The woman's surprise seemed real. "Sabotage the Rover? She lived for the Rover. She said it was going to put her in the history books, her ticket to immortality."

"Was immortality important to her?" Indigo asked.

"She hated obscurity," Doctor Janda said. "We were the ones that called the police on the day she died. It was too unlike her to miss a chance in front of the cameras. All the local stations had interviews lined up with her, and some of the nationals too. When she didn't show, and no one picked up the phone at the house, we knew something went really wrong."

"So there's no chance that the Rover has been sabotaged?" Indigo pressed.

Doctor Janda exchanged guilty looks with some of her programmers. "Someone used Janet's pa.s.skey and pa.s.swords the night after she was killed. We didn't think to report it because all that was accessed were old Rover files. Some of her stuff, and some of Doctor Robb's diddles."

"Diddles?" Indigo and Ukiah asked in duet.

"He was weird-brilliant but weird. He'd waste time coming up with alternate codes to get equipment to do the weirdest stuff. Like this." Doctor Janda pulled out a diagram and pointed to a ma.s.s of circuitry. "This is the short-range radar unit. Sam came up with a diddle that made it act like a radio transmitter, sending out a repeated message signal."

"What was the signal?" Ukiah asked.

The project leader shrugged. "Who knows? A soda jingle maybe. Sam always said it was 'Wake up and come here.'"

Don't wake the sleepers.

Ukiah blinked. The Pack had said it a dozen times, kind of like "G.o.d be with you," and he hadn't thought to ask. Don't wake which sleepers? Pack memory supplied the answer; the crew of one hundredthousand on the main invasion s.h.i.+p. Pack memory also maintained that they were dead. Prime had killed them when he sabotaged the s.h.i.+p by first wiping out all crew wakeup programs and then blowing the torpedoes while still in their launch tubes.

How could you wake sleepers who were dead? Ukiah searched back through the memories to find the source of the quote. It was a fragment of Prime's last thoughts and words as he filled the hypodermic dart that transformed Coyote from wolf to alien being. The true phrase had been "must not/don't allow/forbid those sleeping to be awakened." Prime had repeated it like a chant. What blazed bright in Prime's heart at that moment was the realization that he had to become what he hated in order to fight on past death. He had previously vowed to struggle to his own death, and that would be where it stopped.

What had changed his mind was lost in the flashes of pain's blackness. What was pa.s.sed on to the Pack was the knowledge he had to become a lesser evil to fight a greater evil.

Coyote made his Get and abandoned them, stringing them out behind him. Their wolf-bred instinct, however, drew them together and they worked to make a culture for themselves. The Pack clung to the moment of Coyote's creation, because in it was validation for their own acts of violence and Getting.

So they took their maker's chant and made it their motto, forcing it into a rough English translation: "Don't wake the sleepers." Wolflike, though, they had never questioned what it meant truly. What sleepers?

How could they be awakened if they were dead?

"You okay?" Indigo asked, touching his elbow, drawing him back to the room full of puzzled programmers.

He nodded vaguely. "This course change. Do you know where the Rover is going now?"

"Well . . ." Doctor Janda shuffled through paper on a side desk to pull out a map. She talked as she hunched over the map, skimming fingers over valleys and mountains. "We think it has somehow deviated back to an old course path. There were several camps as to what should be explored. Lots of big-money special interest groups had different ideas on what the mission should be, what was to be explored. In the end, it was the luck of the draw, you know, window of opportunity, and if the Lander sets down where it was supposed to."

"And?" Ukiah pressed.

"Navigating Mars isn't like a jaunt on the moon, or even Earth. Clouds obscure landmarks, and dust storms habitually change them beyond recognition." The project leader paused to finally locate what she was searching for. "Here's the landing site." She traced a meandering line and then tapped on the map.

"This is where the course change came in. See this line? This was one of the original mission paths; it leads up to this crater. It looks like the Rover has merely defaulted back to some prototype code."

"This looks like an impact site." Indigo ran a finger along the curved wall of the indicated valley.

Ukiah stared at the sight with his stomach turning to lead and sinking down through his guts.

"Sure is!" Doctor Janda smiled, oblivious to Ukiah's distress. "Something large hit it about three hundred years ago." The right time frame for the crater to have been made by the main invasion s.h.i.+p.

"Astronomers of the time made note of a flash of light on Mars. There was a lot of interest in studying this crater, but just before the Rover was launched, information from the Hubble telescope indicated that this area would be difficult to transverse. The Rover probably can make it, but no one wanted to take the risk of sending it all that distance to get stuck the second day out. Not with the primary mission being to return mineral samples to Earth."

"How long will it take for the Rover to get into the crater?" Ukiah asked, trying to fight down his growing panic.

Doctor Janda chewed on her bottom lip, eyes squinted as she thought. "Three days-probably. But we're hoping to upload a course correction and get it back on its original mission."

Three days.

"Can you turn off Sam Robb's diddle?"Doctor Janda looked at him in surprise. "Um, no. We need control of the Rover to do that."

Indigo glanced at him, and her eyes widened slightly. "Thank you, Doctor Janda." She caught Ukiah by the arm and guided him toward the door. "We'll let you get back to work. I'll be contacting you later."

Outside in the hall, Indigo gazed up at Ukiah as he leaned heavily against the wall. "What's wrong?"

"My father's people came to invade Earth. A hundred thousand warriors. We thought Prime reduced the main s.h.i.+p to s.p.a.ce dust, but he didn't. The s.h.i.+p is on Mars. It made that impact crater. And if the Ontongard has gone through all this to get the Rover to the s.h.i.+p, then they believe that they can bring those warriors to Earth. I need to go find the Pack and talk to them."

He pushed off the wall and started for the door.

"Why the Pack?" Indigo kept pace with him. "What can they do?"

"I don't know, but Indigo, do you think that anyone else is going to believe that there's an alien invasion s.h.i.+p sitting on Mars and that its sleeping crew is about to be awakened by the hijacked Mars Rover? h.e.l.l, it sounds like they don't even know that the Rover has been hijacked."

She considered it. "No. They've searched that crater with everything man can turn on Mars. The Hubble telescope. SALT. There's no sign of a s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p."

"The s.h.i.+p has s.h.i.+elds against electronic and visual detection," Ukiah said.

"Surely the Rover isn't sophisticated enough to pilot an alien s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p to Earth. h.e.l.l, if the s.h.i.+elds are anything like those in the movies, the Rover won't even be able to get through to the s.h.i.+p."

They pa.s.sed the receptionist and went out into the afternoon heat.

"Pack memories are so weird." Ukiah struggled to explain. "It's like that old story about five blind men and an elephant, each describing the animal by the piece he's standing next to and failing to see the rest. I can wonder 'why can't the humans see the s.h.i.+p?' and the answer 'because of the s.h.i.+elds' comes back. I can tell you where the s.h.i.+eld control panel is, how to fix the s.h.i.+elds, how to sabotage them, the standard protocol in emergency situations dealing with s.h.i.+elds. But what can the Ontongard do with the Rover with the s.h.i.+elds up-I don't have the faintest."

She rubbed her face. "I have to get some sleep. This has gotten too weird for even me. We have three days to stop the Rover. You talk to the Pack tonight, and tomorrow we'll figure something out."

He pulled her close and kissed her. "Want me to drive you home?"

She nuzzled into him. "No. It would just strand me in the South Hills. Drop me downtown and I'll pick up a company car."

"Why not your motorcycle?"

She laughed. "They asked me to ride in something a little more st.u.r.dy until this blows over. This time, when you get done with the Pack, give me a call."

"I could be real late," he warned.

"Then I'll be slightly incoherent. Wake me and talk to me, okay?"

Finding the Pack was easy this time. They scattered and reformed like a flock of birds, but not without coordination. Long ago Rennie had marked out sites to gather, and they cycled through them with the phases of the moon. It was full moon, the sixth month of the year, and thus they were at Rochester Inn.

Ukiah parked his motorcycle in the vast gravel parking lot and pushed his way into the crowded bar. A big-screen TV was playing a baseball game, and as he entered, there was a roar as a fly ball was caught and the score remained deadlocked at the top of the ninth. The air stank of beer, sweat, cigars,whiskey, and an underlying scent of Pack. He brushed through people, learning odd bits of information from them as he worked his way to the Pack.

He found the Pack taking up the back corner of the bar, several tables pushed together and scattered with dirty dishes and beer bottles. The Pack had sensed him coming and had a chair ready for him beside Rennie.

"The memory work?" Rennie asked as Ukiah straddled the chair.

Ukiah nodded. "Worked great. Worked well enough for me to figure out what the Ontongard are up to. We're screwed."

Rennie frowned and the table stilled. "What do you mean?"

"Prime didn't blow the s.h.i.+p. It's on Mars. The d.a.m.n Rover that Janet Haze helped build is on Mars.

They're going to wake the sleepers."

"That can't be," h.e.l.lena whispered.

"They've already taken control of the Rover. They might have already awakened them."

The Pack stood as one and pushed their way through to the big-screen TV. A fly ball had just been hit deep into center field and the outfielder was scrambling. Bear got to the TV first, reached out, and changed the channel as the outfielder missed the ball. There was a howl from the fans, drowned quickly by a snarl from the Pack.

Bear hit the local early news first, doing the headline news. They played updates on the FBI killings-Warner's body had apparently turned up while Indigo was with him. The dead FBI agent's picture vanished to be replaced with the Mars Mission logo. "Late this afternoon, NASA reported that they lost control of the Mars Rover. Attempts are being made to reestablish control." They went to a press conference where a thin, nervous man explained to the local affiliate the exact time and place that they lost control.

"Hex must have known since the beginning that the s.h.i.+p wasn't destroyed," Rennie raged. "That b.a.s.t.a.r.d! No wonder he's always been so smug. All his little plots and deals-they never made sense without knowing this. This is what he's been working toward."

"I don't get it," Bear murmured. "If the snip's been up there all this time, and the Ontongard have always had the remote key, why do they need the Rover?"

"Listen to the background," h.e.l.lena suddenly hissed.

There was a strange warbling noise, repeated over and over again. It was, Ukiah realized, Sam Robb's "wake up and come here" signal. Ukiah frowned, the Pack memory recognizing it as familiar but slow in revealing the information to him.

Rennie growled beside him, recognizing it first. "The shutdown code for the ECM s.h.i.+eld. The s.h.i.+eld must have gone up when the s.h.i.+p crashed, and the remote key had been rendered useless. Normal security protocol. Origination of the shutdown code has to be within the short-range weapon perimeter. That's what they need the Rover for. Once the s.h.i.+eld is down, they can wake the sleepers with the remote."