“Which is why our pilots are kneeling at gunpoint.”

Xavier glanced out the window. Steve and Jo were kneeling on the tarmac, hands behind their heads.

“These are precautions that will end as soon as possible.”

Rachel was in Counselor Nigel’s face. “Do you want to put the handcuffs on us here and march us out one at a time, or wait until we’re outside?”

Counselor Nigel stared at her for a moment, then chose—wisely, Xavier thought—to drop the pretense of normality. “One at a time,” he said. He turned to Chang and Edgely. “You two will go first.”

Edgely helped Chang to the door. The older man looked badly shaken and unsteady. “Then you, Captain Stewart, followed by your daughter, then Mr. Radhakrishnan,” Counselor Nigel said.

Rachel took Yahvi’s hand, partly to reassure the girl, partly, Xavier suspected, to show a bit more defiance. “Better leave Zeds for last,” Rachel said to Counselor Nigel. “He takes a while.”

Then she and Yahvi went through the door.

Xavier glanced at the readouts. He still needed more time, though less than he’d thought earlier. That was one of the problems with the proteus—lack of precision. Ten minutes, possibly.

And the three officers were working their way toward him. “Mr. Toutant,” Counselor Nigel said.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Would you come with us, please?”

“I’m not actually feeling that good,” Xavier said, improvising only slightly. The tense maneuvers had left him momentarily queasy and dizzy. “Can I just rest here for a while?”

“You’d be more comfortable in quarters.”

“You mean jail?”

“You’re not going to jail.”

“Great, then I’d like to rent a car. I’ve always wanted to see L.A. Maybe you guys could help me with that.”

Counselor Nigel’s patience expired. He gestured to his companions and the soldiers, who started for Xavier.

Zeds, who had been silent and motionless throughout the whole exchange, stepped forward, blocking the five assailants as easily as an NFL lineman would a group of peewees.

“Mr. Toutant, tell it to step aside!”

“Zeds,” Xavier said, trying not to laugh, “try to get out of their way.”

“I am,” Zeds said, his voice booming in the cabin. Xavier wasn’t actually sure that Zeds had deliberately gotten in Nigel’s way . . . apparently Nigel and his cronies were confused, too—or they might have shot the Sentry.

Or tried to. Xavier wasn’t sure gunfire would be an effective way to stop the big alien.

While the six beings were trying to sort themselves out, Xavier watched the printer and its line to the Plan B container, weighing the moment when he would have to disconnect it.

Minutes. “Hey, Counselor Nigel, everyone. I think I’m feeling better, so let’s just all relax—”

Bing! It took Xavier a considerable amount of willpower to keep from looking at the proteus.

Zeds’s struggles had ceased. He was now past Counselor Nigel and passing between the two soldiers, who were keeping their weapons trained on him.

“And since we’re all being calm about things,” Xavier said, hoping to keep everyone’s attention on him, not his cargo, “I would love to know how you found us.”

“I don’t have that information,” Counselor Nigel said, “and probably couldn’t tell you if I did. Please be aware, however, that entry to Free Nation airspace is tightly controlled. Any unauthorized aircraft was in danger.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Xavier said. Then he shouted, “Zeds!”

All heads turned toward the Sentry, who, bent over like an old man, paused midway through in the cockpit door. As they looked away, as innocuously as he could, Xavier kicked the connecting tube free of the Plan B container. “Wait for me at the bottom of the stairs!”

The only giveaway was the smell of residual Substance K poison in the tube.

The ruse seemed to have worked: Xavier stepped away from the printer, past Counselor Nigel and his two companions, and was about to be grabbed by the soldiers when he had another thought. “Can we wait just a second?”

He started digging through the Substance K cargo. “Don’t do that,” Counselor Nigel said. He and his male companion tackled Xavier before he could examine more than four boxes.

But that was sufficient. As he was gently but firmly hauled forward and toward the cabin door, he carried with him the sight of a small unit stuck to the bottom of one of the containers.

It was a bug, almost certainly some kind of tracking device that had told Free Nation U.S. and the Aggregates exactly where Rachel’s crew was at all times.

Fucking Kaushal.

The lamestream media has been telling us for years that the Aggregates brought peace and prosperity to North America—that’s only the biggest of their lies.

But now they are ignoring the stories of some kind of migration, all the units and formations moving to the southwest, apparently Arizona.

At the same time Keanu is back and sending ships here. Will we be seeing some kind of landing in the desert? If so, will it be Aggregates leaving?

Or more of them arriving?

Or something even worse!?!

POSTER TREYNOLDS, TRUEPOST.COM,

APRIL 20, 2040

WHIT

“L minus eighty-five,” a woman’s voice said, as Counselor Kate swiped a key and opened the door to Ring mission control.

“You’re sure you’re not giving me too much time?” Whit said. He joked when nervous. Amazingly, few people ever understood that.

“This is an emergency. We had a dropout.”

The twenty hours between his bizarre encounter with Aggregate Carbon-143 and the terminal count to First Light were the strangest and most exhausting in Whit Murray’s life.

His THE handler, Counselor Kate, had found him just seconds after the Aggregate creature departed. “Come with me,” she said. “You saw the clock.”

Fifteen minutes later he was inside Ring mission control, a windowless room whose walls were screens showing the Ring structure and elements, some of them close-ups of pipes and electrical connections, others of nasty-looking military hardware, still others landscapes. Overall, it reminded Whit of old footage he had seen of the moments before rocket launches . . . the giant frosted tubes, the cables, the gantries, the wisps of vapor.

Although every human in the room seemed calm, there was no chatter, no sound except for labored breathing. It was the tensest environment Whit had ever experienced. For a moment he regretted possessing his “talent,” or at least letting it be discovered. “Here,” Kate said, showing him a new station in the last row, which was empty.

The cubicle looked a lot like his former station—the same chair, the same keyboard and screen. What was different was a cyberlink headset and gloves. “Put these on.” Kate picked them up and prepared to help him.

“I’ve worn them before,” he said, though to play games when he was thirteen, not to help control a beam of energy strong enough to microwave a planet.

The headset and gloves were warm, as if someone else had just removed them. Whit wondered what had happened to the previous wearer—on a break, he hoped, as opposed to being taken out and executed for some kind of failure. He wanted to ask Kate what “dropout” meant, but this wasn’t the moment.

She wasn’t leaving him, however. “I’ll be with you.” She sat down at the unused station next to Whit’s and donned her own headset and gloves.

Then, as his eyes, ears, and brain adjusted to the link, as he felt the familiar meld with the system (he had a mouse pad but would also be able to access new data with the twitch of a facial muscle), Whit forgot about Kate and actually ceased to worry about his role.

He just took in the experience, literally feeling the pulse of power as it built throughout the Ring system, being pulled from grids all over the western Free Nation U.S. One window showed him the grid and the flow of electrons. Another displayed the storage.