Hedrick nodded. “Von Braun was a good man.”

“See, Jon? Hedrick and all these guys will get off. The government will make a deal with them. They’ll want that head start. You watch, this whole place will be back in business within months.”

Alexa stood by Grady and shouted at the screen. “What the hell are you saying, Cotton?”

On-screen he winced and held up his hands. “I’m saying, you really need to tear the problem out by the roots.”

Grady called up to him, “Stick to the plan, Cotton!”

“That’s just it; this really always was the plan. My plan at least. Nothing personal . . .”

“Cotton!”

Hedrick and Morrison glowered at the screen, exchanging worried glances. Morrison finally held up his hands. “Okay, Cotton! I give up! You win. Just bring in the military.”

Hedrick nodded. “Yes, we surrender.”

“Right, but as you’ve often said, Hedrick: It’s for the greater good.”

On-screen Cotton tapped a virtual button.

Suddenly the entire BTC headquarters lurched—and everyone and everything in it went into free fall.

CHAPTER 33

Fallen

Grady twisted around, struggling to right himself as he fell—then hit hard against the ceiling of Hedrick’s office. Curio cases, furniture, and other bodies landed around him, but they didn’t smash to pieces in the way he’d expect. The building seemed to be half a second behind them in falling, as soul-wrenching cracks and groans tore through the air—a sound like city-size icebergs colliding. But now the building, too, had begun to fall before the room’s contents impacted on the forty-foot-high ceiling.

With the wind knocked out of him, Grady struggled for breath as he attempted to stand—which he found easy since he was in free fall. He staggered around in a daze amid floating furniture and objets d’art, his feet barely touching the ceiling, which now could just as easily have been a wall.

He looked up to see a static view of Paris out the window, looking down the Champs-Élysées. It corresponded not at all with the free fall he was in, and his brain rebelled—and he began to feel nauseated.

The sound of mountains colliding rumbled through the walls. The room lurched again, and a sharp crack ripped the air, setting his ears to ringing. His body suddenly forgot to vomit as he twisted around and saw Morrison and Alexa struggling with each other in free fall. Her gun floated yards away. Grady guessed it had fallen from her hand when she hit the ceiling.

“Alexa!”

She didn’t answer. She was busy trying to find some leverage to use her superior strength against Morrison as they grappled in midair. She finally pushed off a floating sofa and slugged Morrison twice in the face.

But Morrison refused to let go.

Grady had strayed from the ceiling somewhat, and he tried to swim through the air to get back to it—to use it as a launching pad. “I’m coming!”

She shouted back at him. “Hedrick! Get Hedrick!”

Grady scanned the cavernous office with his eyes. It was difficult to remember which way had originally been up—he was lost as he looked across a debris field of floating furniture, art, and other objects, broken and whole. But then he saw Hedrick’s massive desk, upside down, and Hedrick pulling himself hand over hand along the walls to get to a side door. The man was forty feet away.

“Hedrick!”

Hedrick didn’t look back. He just kept moving as a set of double doors opened automatically to admit him to a gallery beyond. Grady thought he remembered it—and then it occurred to him that Hedrick was heading toward his museum of “contained” technology.

“Goddamnit . . .” Grady clawed at the floor or wall or whatever was next to him and pushed against floating objects to use their inertia to impart forward movement on him. He wracked his mind to calculate the best way to make progress.

And there in his sight line Grady saw his gravis wrapped around the scout helmet and floating amid the other debris. It must have landed near him since he’d had it in his hands when he fell.

Grady grabbed them both and started buckling the gravis on. As he did so, he passed below Morrison and Alexa. He could see Morrison had somehow gotten hold of a Victorian desk clock, and he was trying to bludgeon her with it.

He shouted toward her. “I found my gravis! I’m coming—”

“I already have one! Get Hedrick!”

Grady powered it up and pulled his helmet on. He glanced back at the doors where Hedrick had already disappeared. He then looked back up at Alexa and made his decision—changing his direction of descent toward her and Morrison.

But he went nowhere. He was still in free fall.

She glared down at him from thirty feet above as she peeled Morrison’s fingers from her throat. “You’re in a more powerful mirror! That’s how Morrison stopped us before! Your gravis is useless inside it!” She slugged Morrison again.

He shouted, “I don’t understand!”

“You invented the damn thing, you tell me! Just go after Hedrick! There are places he can escape to! Don’t let him get away!” She grunted and did a backward somersault, wrapping her legs around Morrison’s head and squeezing until his face reddened.

Morrison struggled mightily. “Aghh, you bitch!”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Go, Jon!”

Reluctantly, Grady continued pulling his way through the free-falling debris field and out the gallery doors. He couldn’t help but wonder at the interaction of the gravity fields—was it a matter of power? Was it like acoustics? Did they subtract each other? No . . . because equal fields didn’t seem to.

He snapped out of pondering gravity and looked ahead. He could now see the long exhibit gallery—only everything was turned upside down, with exhibits floating in midair. He shaded his eyes against the blinding white light of the first fusion reactor, suspended in its sealed case.

Up ahead he could see Hedrick clawing his way along the carpet.

“Hedrick!”

There was another huge rumble, followed by a colossal CRACK. A seam appeared in the wall nearby and quickly expanded, wood splitting. Suddenly the howl of wind started blowing through the corridor—although Grady was still surrounded by interior walls.

He was nearly blown back out the gallery doors into the office again, but as he looked up, he could see that Hedrick had fallen back along the exhibit gallery as well. Grady finally got a good look at the man.

Hedrick looked worried but also determined. In a moment the director fished through his pockets and came up with a small object, which he aimed back at Grady.

“Shit . . .” Grady pushed off from the wall and sailed across the corridor just as an explosion blasted apart the burled wood paneling and sent him rolling end over end. He landed hard against something.

He got his bearings, feeling the carpeting with his hands, and looked up through what was suddenly a great deal more debris, smoke, and now fire to see Hedrick upside down thirty feet ahead, struggling with some sort of large piece of equipment.

“Hedrick!”

Hedrick aimed again, losing control of his rotation as he looked up. The shot went wide. Grady ducked down as another blast tore apart several display cases. Thousands more pieces of flaming debris entered the air around him, burning him as he batted them away. The flames were fanned by the howling wind.

And then another sharp CRACK, like the earth itself coming apart, filled the air so loudly it momentarily drowned out the howling of the wind. The building groaned deafeningly.

 • • •

Richard Cotton stared through a series of remote holographic exterior images of BTC headquarters. Beta-Tau had gotten him access to the surveillance dust littering surrounding buildings, and now before him was a three-dimensional hologram of downtown Detroit—with the jaw-dropping sight of BTC headquarters and a hundred meters of land in every direction around it tearing up out of the ground. Ten- and five-story buildings around BTC headquarters disintegrated as they fell upward—with the U.S. district court imploding on itself as concrete and soil from the ground beneath rushed through it.