Chapter 11

If, in the event of a catastrophe, you manage to remember your identity, your chances of survival will probably triple. If by a minor miracle, you somehow retain logical reasoning and critical thought, you will have surpassed (if only the cliché) masses of humanity which flounder in their plight. And finally, if you can master your senses and control motor-skills and muscle movements during such a crisis—well, you have probably been trained in the Armed Forces.
Sofi, Oscar, and the rest of the team qualified in the final category—the minority, to say the least. Warren did not. While he managed to think and demand action of his body, the rush of adrenaline (again) made his movements shaky and his grasp weak. And so he fumbled with the packing job to which Sofi had mandated him. He managed to follow the directions—when he actually saw them—and had nearly half the equipment packed when the window in the far corner of the room suddenly glowed with a bright pink haze.
Ali chirped and switched shoulders three times to figure out which afforded her the best vista of the window, as Warren crouched and skittered towards the window. He knew this action would be severely dissuaded by Sofi, but the intrigue of the luminous pink glow, now coating the room through the light drapes. His mind blitzed through questions before he had a chance to answer any of them. The final one he settled on—what was going on here?
When he reached the window sill, pulled back the drapes a bit, and peaked out, the scene which greeted his eyes blew his imagination to bits. Dominating the landscape, a large pink globe, hovering a couple feet off the ground, rotated—like a giant disco ball, Warren thought—and radiated a bright, but warm light, which blanketed everything around it. Looking to his extreme right, he saw the edge of another of the slowly spinning globes. But as he studied the landscape more, he found that smaller pink globules were breaking off from the big ones, floating—not in random directions—but towards the house. He also noticed from beyond the cherry spheres the small, indistinct contours of men with rifles behind cover.
Just before he decided to continue packing, he heard a muffled yell and saw the smoke of a rocket-propelled grenade take off towards a hedge where he had spotted some of the besiegers. But to his utter surprise, the rocket slowed, as if fired underwater, lost altitude and fell to the ground, sputtering along the grass until the rocket motor burned out. It fizzled for a moment on the lawn, then exploded, having only covered about a third of the distance between the house and the adversaries.
As the dust and smoke cleared, Warren began to see the pink light reflecting off of other spots in the lawn. He squinted. The pieces must be metal—then it struck him: they were bullets that had been fired at the enemy. Somehow the pink globes negated momentum—like an inertia generator or something. So surprised at his discovery was Warren that when the three knocks came at the door, it took him several moments to remember what the knocks signified, and then several more seconds to actually walk to the door and unlock it.
Old Fred stumbled into the room, panic-eyed. “Useless!” he cried, eyes glancing about the room—evidently searching for something. “It’s all useless—come on, where’s the damn…aha!” He picked up a hand-held device and began tapping away at it.”
“What’s happening, Old Fred?” Warren queried.
“They…uh…” Fredric began, as distracted as a four year old with a new toy. “Came. And…holy shit! How long?” He dropped the piece of equipment and snuck to the window, peering out for a moment, then crept back to Warren. “You’re coming with me. Leave all this; Sofi will worry about that.” And he grabbed Warren by the arm and the two sprinted through the halls. “Five minutes has never seemed so long in my life!” he ranted as they turned a corner into the dining room, where Livingstone was descending the stairs and spat.
“They shot at me!” he yelled, with obvious frustration and jumped the final three stairs.
“Welcome to my world!” Fredric snapped and flung Warren to a chair. Warren’s hands automatically (as had been the case for several hours now) cupped themselves around Ali on his shoulder.
“But you don’t understand—I was IN.”
“What do you mean ‘in’?” Old Fred wondered while creeping back to the dining room window.
“In their manual glider. They had absolutely no reason to suspect I stole it! And they shot at me!” Livingstone ranted, joining him at the window. “I hate being shot at.”
“They have terrible aim anyway,” Fredric soothed.
“But still, blind luck pays dividends sometimes. I don’t want to be killed by blind luck. In fact, I don’t want to be killed at all.”
“You are in the wrong line of work if you don’t want to be killed you know. You might have gone into masonry or something.”
“Forget that! At least I have a gun if someone shoots at me. But I was in their glider! Who shoots at their own glider?”
“Evidently the Mar.”
“I’m surprised you guys didn’t shoot me down.”
“You were on the radio, telling us it was you.”
“And I’m supposed to trust that you’ll believe me and that you won’t shoot at me?” Livingstone wondered.
“Yes! It’s called teamwork.”
“Like the San Diego exercise?”
“Luke was shot because he was an idiot.”
“And how do I know you wouldn’t shoot me down and call me an idiot afterwards?”
Old Fred began to reply, but the sudden thumping of a helicopter had drowned them out. Warren, who had been thinking about Old Fred’s citation of the wonderful communication that existed between himself and Oscar, now sensed a newer desperation crossing the faces of the two at the window. Through the doors of the kitchen behind them came Sofi and the rest of the team she had evidently rounded up, including Trent. Fred and Oscar joined them at the table, where Sofi began yelling over the helicopter.
“Trent tells me that these generators which make our armaments at present useless against them work both ways and that’s why we haven’t seen any responsive fire on their part. But he thinks it’s more than just defense, or a way of keeping us under siege. Tell them, Trent,” she demanded.
“If it works like I think it does, these pink balls basically mitigate the effect of forces—like the force behind a propelled bullet. This also probably makes it extremely difficult to run past them. They have been closing slowly on the building, which will make it more and more difficult for us to escape. But more than this, I think the effect on the structure itself will be profound. Architects carefully measure and direct forces to keep the building standing—by uses of arches, braces, supports, etc. Well, when these balls reach the edge of the building, the effect on the structural integrity will probably be extreme. I imagine then, that the helicopter has some sort of concussive weapon aboard. When the structure’s integral binding forces have been eliminated, it will become a house of cards—held together by only a few flimsy bolts and nails, not by the sheer forces acting on each other. So, in the same way that an earthquake produces a tsunami in the ocean, they’ll attack the house in this manner: by producing a tsunami in the air. And our “house of cards” will not hold up.”
The menacing thumps of the helicopter dominated the silence, while eyes searched eyes at the table. “So what do we do?” Old Fred finally asked. “We have five minutes until the waypoint even begins.”
“I say we down that helicopter,” Livingstone offered. “We may have a slight advantage over the effect of those balls by shooting from the roof, if our target gets low enough.”
Sofi nodded. “I agree. The bird is our number one priority; if we can keep it from blowing the house down, we might be able to slip paths and escape before the Mar make it into the house. How long do we have Fred?”
“I count…three minutes and twenty-eight seconds….now,” he determined.
“Okay, everyone to the upstairs bedroom with the skylights,” Sofi ordered and everyone at the table split and filed up the stairs—at what might be noted as a less than normal pace, perhaps even sluggish would describe it. When they surrounded the skylight and prepared to exit to the roof, they found, suspended on a cable below the helicopter, yet another of the pink balls. Fredric, per usual, was the first to speak.
“I don’t think they mean to crush the house.”
“They mean to trap us—we need to get to the very center of the house, away from the physical influence of the orbs,” Sofi counseled. “How much time until the waypoint opens?”
“Just under two minutes,” Old Fred answered.
“That’s all we need to hold out; it’s likely that when the event occurs, you should feel a little different, as the influence of another history, one hopefully without the globes, should give us the chance to run,” said Sofi, and so the troupe, even more lethargically, descended the stairs and found a basement bedroom nearly in the center of the house, about as far away from any brilliant, pink orb as possible. Oscar and Fredric took up positions by the door, with six (including Trent) forming a line behind them. Two more found cover positions protecting Sofi and Warren, while Ali dug herself into his collar.
The silence was awful (it seemed to take a special toll on Fredric)—but they new better than to talk and reveal their location. For surely the enemy knew the waypoint was close to breaking and would be sending troops in to wipe them out before they had any chance of escape. Old Fred had since handed the countdown device to Sofi in return for an ammo clip—and she checked it addictively. Warren tried not to breathe. Livingstone fidgeted, quite obviously uncomfortable with waiting.
At the minute mark, Sofi nudged Warren—he looked at the screen and then smiled at her. She seemed intent on listening for footsteps. At thirty seconds, she let out a sharp hiss, every eye turned to her. She flashed her ten fingers three times. Everyone seemed to tense up—each had a finger caressing a trigger. Warren wondered what exactly might happen once they crossed the threshold of the waypoint. Would he indeed feel himself move at all? Would he feel different? Would he notice anything strange? Or would it simply pass, leaving him to hope for the best?
Sofi flashed ten fingers. Warren felt his heartbeat rise. Five fingers. How precise could their calculations be? Three fingers. Warren covered Ali with a hand. One finger. Everyone sighed. With each second after (for the next fifteen or so) no one dared to breathe. Eyes glanced around the room, from gaze to gaze. Warren hadn’t noticed any change. Livingstone stood and stretched a leg—hopped once, twice. He shook his head and scowled at the door.
Just as it seemed he was about to say something, the door exploded. Two small, round metallic containers skipped into the room. One flashed brilliantly—but lacked the customary bang of a concussion grenade. Still, Warren found his vision blurred with white light. As it started to clear, the only sound, a lonely hiss, gave him a momentary hint that perhaps the fog wasn’t all in his vision. But by the time he had figured out that there was indeed a mist issuing from the other canister, a sudden, crushing wave of exhaustion overpowered his mind, and Warren faded into a deep, soothing sleep, ignoring the muffled, distant sounds of human voices and some irritating pops.