Linkage: The Narrows of Time (40 page)

The tech typed into his computer, then
reported, “Confirmed, sir. The pad’s still online and available for
transport.”

“What about ground transportation?” Kleezebee
asked Bruno.

“Our van should still be parked in the
underground garage.”

“All right then, you go with Lucas. But make
it quick.”

* * *

Ninety minutes later, Lucas and Bruno
returned from their trip to Phoenix. Lucas put a torn, dirty
cardboard box on the floor in front of Kleezebee, then blew off a
cloud of dust. He’d found it in a corner of his dad’s workshop next
to a pile of old clothes ready for donation to Goodwill.

“What the hell is that?” Kleezebee asked.

“It’s one of my dad’s inventions,” Lucas said
with a proud grin on his face. He unfolded the box and pulled out a
black device the size of a cigarette pack, which was attached to a
two-inch-square power transformer. He untangled the six-foot
electrical cord before handing it to Kleezebee. “Dad called it a
Sonic Pad.”

Kleezebee tested the device’s retractable
legs before wiping the dirt off its ring of sensors lined up across
its middle, directly below the miniature antenna protruding from
its top. He gave the unit to Bruno.

There was one more item lying in the bottom
of the box—a notebook containing his dad’s handwritten notes. Lucas
opened the journal, fanning the pages to demonstrate its contents
before giving it to Kleezebee. “Dad’s handwriting is worse than a
doctor’s, but I can translate if you need me to.”

“What’s this thing do?” Bruno asked, holding
the sonic pad away from his body as if it were an explosive.

“It’s for pest control. And it works
awesome.” Lucas thought about mentioning the device’s one minor
flaw, but decided against it. He didn’t see how the liquefaction of
a dog’s brain had any relevance to their current situation. At
least the device wasn’t harmful to humans.

“Pests?” Bruno asked.

“Dad networked a series of these around our
yard to kill scorpions. If one of them crawled inside the
perimeter, the motion sensors triangulated its location, sending a
finely tuned blend of infrasonic and ultrasonic sound waves at the
creature. The blast was powerful enough to shatter the bug’s
segmented body. They’d explode like popcorn.”

Kleezebee was busy skimming through the
journal and remained silent.

“Dad hated scorpions. They were always
wandering inside the house at night and after Mom had stepped on
her third one, he decided we needed to do something else. The
commercial pesticides he sprayed were slow to work, if at all.”

“Damn ingenious,” Kleezebee said, pointing at
one particular page in the notebook. “The pad emits an inaudible
set of specifically calibrated sonic pulses that attack the
creature’s nervous system. It would work whether the scorpion was
awake or asleep.”

“Do you think we can adapt it?” Lucas asked
his boss.

“For what?” Bruno replied.

“For the Krellians,” Lucas answered.

“It might work. But we’ll need to crank up
the juice considerably.”

“We might be able to use the E-121 for the
additional power,” Lucas said.

“Excellent idea. We can use it to power all
of them.”

“All of them?” Bruno asked.

“We’ll need to arm each member of the rescue
team with one of these. We certainly don’t have enough bullets to
kill a hive ship full of warriors.”

“Do we have time to make enough of them?”
Lucas asked.

Kleezebee opened the med-lab’s hidden door
and walked inside where Trevor was working. Lucas followed him.
“Rig a power source based on E-121 and make as many copies of this
as you can,” Kleezebee told Trevor. “We’ll need it weaponized by
morning.”

“
Ja,
will do.”

“BioTex can replicate inanimate objects?”
Lucas asked the professor.

“Sure, why not? They’re much less complicated
than replicating a living organism. Granted, it’s not a very
efficient use of our technology, but given the time constraint, we
don’t have a choice.”

* * *

The following morning, Lucas was ready to
head to the video room to meet up with Kleezebee and his staff. The
aliens were due to reappear in sixty-two minutes for the exchange,
but first he needed to stop at the mess hall on the way down to
fill up on caffeine—he had battled a serious case of insomnia
through the night, leaving him exhausted. He couldn’t get Drew out
of his mind all night long. He kept seeing his little brother
sitting in a corner of a Krellian jail cell, surrounded by the
blood and guts from hundreds of men eaten right before his
eyes.

When he looked back over the events of the
past few days, it was almost surreal. It felt like he was in a
low-budget sci-fi movie, one filled with endless twists and turns,
almost too much for anyone to believe. Yet it was real and
happening to him and his family. If they somehow survived this
mess, he promised himself to write a novel about their experiences.
Even if no one ever read his story, he felt it was important to
chronicle the events, to pay homage to those who had suffered and
died.

Earlier last night, he had spent several
hours consoling his mother after explaining what had happened to
Drew. It wasn’t easy to tell her, but he managed to get through it.
He took great care to relay the tragic news with a positive spin,
but despite his optimistic words of rescue, his mother took the
news of Drew’s abduction extremely hard. In her eyes, he knew he
only had one job to do—protect his little brother—a job that he had
failed miserably. He worried that she might never forgive him.

After what seemed like half the night, his
mother finally managed to fall asleep. Lucas left her side and
snuck down to the silo’s armory. A traditional handgun would be too
loud for a stealthy assault, so he decided to grab two of
Kleezebee’s stunners instead. He flung one of the Kevlar vests over
his shoulder before returning to his own room. He sat on the edge
of his bed for almost an hour, staring at Drew’s empty bunk. He
sobbed quietly until his body was devoid of tears and energy, then
he crawled into bed and shut his eyes. Other than the sound of his
heart beating, the room was dead silent. He felt like he was
marooned on an island’s beach without another soul around for
hundreds of miles. He let out a muted chuckle when he thought about
a floating FedEx box washing ashore with a volleyball inside. All
he needed was some coconut hair and a pair of figure skates, he
thought. But he decided he would call his imaginary friend Drew,
not Wilson.

In the morning, he strapped one of stunners
to his ankle and slipped the other one inside the back of his
trousers. He hid the Kevlar vest under his shirt, readying himself
for the fight. Lucas was in such a rush to join Kleezebee that he
forgot to check on his mother, who was sleeping in the room across
the hall. He was in the elevator, almost down to the surveillance
room, before he thought of her. He rationalized his
absentmindedness by telling himself that she needed extra time to
rest, and he shouldn’t disturb her.

When Lucas walked out of the elevator, he
found Kleezebee and Trevor fitting Bruno with a jet-black vest.
Five feet away from them was a four-wheeled sled with a stack of
five-gallon containers filled to the brim with scarlet-colored
liquid.

The vest contained a series of bulging
pockets with a set of electrical wires hop-scotching between them.
All the vest needed was a few dozen sticks of dynamite and Bruno
would have looked like a Islamic suicide bomber ready to take out a
shopping mall. Bruno was wearing street clothes under the
vest—white polo shirt, dark slacks, and brown loafers. The polo
shirt fit his sagging gut much better than his uniform top did,
except it highlighted his baseball-sized bellybutton recess. The
only part of Bruno’s outfit Lucas recognized was the
pentagon-shaped watch. Overall, Bruno actually looked good in
casual attire.

“What do you think?” Kleezebee asked, leaning
forward on his crutches to tug at the open belt clip hanging from
the front of Bruno’s vest. “Trevor did a hell of a job integrating
your father’s device.”

“It’s almost comfortable,” Bruno said,
clipping the belt to close the vest around his midsection.

There was a second vest lying on the table
next to Trevor. Since it was much too small to fit Trevor or
Kleezebee, Lucas assumed the vest was for him. Either that, or it
was for one of the skinny security officers to wear. He assumed
they only had time to make two vests, not the dozen Kleezebee
ordered.

“We’re calling it a Sonic Disrupter,”
Kleezebee said.

Lucas picked up the second vest to inspect
it. Each of the garment’s six front pockets contained a smaller
version of his father’s sonic pad. “Nice work.”

“Trevor constructed it out of interwoven
layers of Kevlar fiber. Should be able to withstand one hell of a
beating.”

Lucas opened the vest and looked inside.
Attached along the lining were more of the electrical wires
connecting each sonic pad to an orange pouch sewn inside the back
of the vest. Lucas tore open the pouch’s Velcro zipper.

“That’s the E-121 power unit,” Kleezebee
said, holding up a push-button activator switch. “All you have to
do is press this button.”

Lucas didn’t see any wires connecting the
switch to the vest. “Wireless?”

Kleezebee nodded.

Bruno walked around the room with the vest
wrapped around his chest, though not in a normal upright posture.
He was leaning slightly backward. “I don’t know. It’s a tad
back-heavy.”

“That’s the E-121,” Kleezebee replied. “We
could add a counterweight to the front?”

“If you make it any heavier, I’ll be too slow
to react. I think I just need to get used to it.”

“Why are you using multiple sonic pads in one
vest?” Lucas asked the professor.

“We tested it on the alien corpse and found
that we needed to use multiple combinations of infrasonic and
ultrasonic waves. Otherwise, it had little effect.”

“You should have seen the mess when that
thing popped,” Bruno added.

“It took longer to tweak than we expected, so
we only had time to make the two vests.”

“Is the other vest for me?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, go ahead and put it on,” Kleezebee
said, testing the trigger on the activation switch. “If something
goes wrong during the exchange, I want you and the security team to
do whatever is needed to bring Drew home.”

“So we’re going to wait until the exchange?”
Lucas asked, wondering why they weren’t going in ahead of schedule,
in a pre-emptive assault.

“Yes. They might just return him without a
fight.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you? What
about what Alicia said?”

“Her intel could be wrong. We have to try the
diplomatic solution first. An all-out assault is our last
resort.”

Lucas disagreed and wished he were the one
making the decisions. He checked to make sure the stunner hidden
inside the back of his waistband was still out of sight. It
was.

“Once we have him back, what then?” Bruno
asked.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
For now, let’s try to rescue Drew and not get us all killed in the
process.” Kleezebee turned to face his techs and said, “Once we’re
back, be sure to close the rift immediately.” The tech nodded.

Lucas slid on the vest, but initially had
trouble buckling the belt’s clip. He didn’t say anything about the
snug fit, fearing they might discover the protective vest hiding
under his shirt and the stunner tucked in his pants. Having two
layers of protection couldn’t hurt, assuming he could breathe
properly. He finally got the belt clipped and waited for
Kleezebee’s orders.

“As a good faith gesture, Bruno and I will
step through with a small amount of BioTex. I suspect they’ll want
to test its authenticity. Once they do, I’ll demand they return
Drew before we conclude the exchange.” Kleezebee told Trevor,
“Remember, don’t step through with the rest of the material until I
call for you.” Trevor nodded.

“What do you need me to do?” Lucas asked.

“You stay here with Trevor and monitor the
exchange.”

“But I’m wearing the other vest,” Lucas
replied, holding up the activation switch. “What if something goes
wrong?”

“Bruno will activate his device. Then we’ll
improvise.”

Lucas wondered why Kleezebee gave him the
second vest to wear if he did not intend to let him join the fight.
Maybe the professor had other plans, or possibly Kleezebee knew it
was the only way to shut him up. Either way, it seemed like a waste
of technology, but he chose not to argue the point. Lucas figured
he could jump through the rift and use his stunners if need be.
Kleezebee wouldn’t be in a position to stop him. “Fine, what do you
need me to monitor?”

Kleezebee held up a pair of pendant
necklaces. “The techs have built a one-way video/audio transmitter
into these pendants that should allow you to see what’s going on
during the exchange.” He pointed to a pair of unmanned video
monitors, just to the right of his lead technician. “We’ll pipe the
signals through to those monitoring stations.”

“Will they be powerful enough to carry the
signal back here, across dimensions?” Lucas asked.

Kleezebee didn’t answer. Instead, he looked
at his lead tech.

The tech nodded. “Won’t be a problem, sir.
We’ve programmed the transmitters to scan the rift and match its
energy signature. We should be able to piggyback the carrier wave,
drawing additional energy from the rift to send it through.”

“That’s assuming the bugs leave the rift open
the entire time,” Lucas replied.

“True,” the tech answered.

Chapter
30

Exchange

Twenty-two minutes later, the Krellians
opened the rift in the same location as before. It started as a
pinpoint before growing to full size, sending flashes of light
rippling across the walls.