She shook her head. “I thought it was ridiculous. The AI had an impressive track record, but human relationships are much too subjective to accurately predict. And how could our being in love possibly impact a future war with the Swarm?
“When I objected to the assignment, Nari and the AI both insisted that I could just be myself. They specifically told me not to fake anything. I honestly thought there was no way I’d ever fall in love with you. I’ve interacted with countless men during my stay on Earth, and none of them did much for me. I wasn’t even sure I could fall in love.”
She lowered her eyes. “But I did,” she said softly. “The damn AI was right.”
Tessa lifted her head and gazed deeply into my eyes. “It’s like that Star Trek episode—”
“Enough already!” I said. “Did they train you with pop culture references they knew I’d respond to?”
“It isn’t like that,” protested Tessa. “I’m a geek at heart—which is one of the reasons I did fall in love with you.”
She allowed herself the hint of a smile. “Those of us living in fake Ohio saw all the shows and movies that you did. On our fake televisions and in our fake movie theaters. And I watched a lot of them growing up. Besides,” she added with a twinkle in her eye, “having a nanite-assisted photographic memory and quick recall helps me wield pop-culture references like a Ninja.”
From what I had seen, she did a lot of things like a Ninja. “What about—”
I never finished the sentence. One moment the sky was a perfect blue expanse, not interrupted by even a wisp of a cloud for as far as the eye could see. The next moment four tic-tac UFOs appeared high above us, arriving so quickly it was as if they had always been there.
I glanced at Tessa, and the astonished expression on her face told me that this was a surprising development even for a trusted spy born inside a hollowed-out asteroid.
While I watched, all four vehicles rose out of sight in the blink of an eye. Then, in another blink, one of the four raced back down to two hundred feet and exploded into a white-hot mass of fire and superheated matter, an explosion seemingly powerful enough to rip a hole in the very fabric of the sky.
The force and fury of the explosion was apocalyptic, at least the equivalent of several nukes, and I knew that no power on Earth could prevent me from being vaporized in the next instant.
33
As I stood on a bluff overlooking an ocean, the blinding explosion dissipated, and Tessa and I were left completely unscathed. What had seemed like irresistibly strong forces, like heat scorching enough to feel at home on the surface of the sun, had somehow failed to make their presence felt.
“What in the hell just happened!” I shouted at Tessa. “And why aren’t we dead?”
“The island is protected by an invisible force dome,” she replied hurriedly. “The ship didn’t explode on its own, it crashed into the dome at tens of thousands of miles per hour. And the dome must have held.”
The other three alien craft suddenly reappeared at their original positions above us and immediately began sending an immense barrage of energies at the force-shield, unimaginable forces that now made the dome visible as a rainbow of shifting, shimmering colors.
The shield blocked most of the hellish forces directed against it, but even the tiny fraction that leaked through caused a powerful earthquake that rattled the entire island like a dog shaking itself dry. Tessa and I were thrown off our feet and onto the hard ground.
“Brad!” screamed Tessa into her comm, which, unlike mine, she had never removed. “Brad, come in! The dome is under attack from multiple UAVs of unknown origin. You need to have Nari scramble AI-controlled ships from the Moon! Now!”
“I can’t!” came the colonel’s frantic reply, which my enhanced hearing could pick up even though Tessa’s comm was embedded deep inside her ear. “Nari and I ended our connection before the attack began, and I can’t get him back. It’s like my attempt is being blocked.”
“Impossible!” bellowed Tessa. We made no effort to rise from the ground as the island continued its convulsions, and I began to panic that it would shake apart like the Gulfstream jet we’d been in.
“I’m ordering all military forces on this island to protect you and Jason,” said the colonel. “With their lives if necessary.”
“If the shield doesn’t hold,” replied Tessa, “nothing can help us. This has to be Michelle and her faction,” she added. “How else to explain UAVs? Or your inability to reconnect with Nari? Humans sure as hell don’t have the tech to pull that off. So it’s an inside job.”
“Agreed,” said the voice of Brad Schoenfeld.
In the distance dozens and dozens of human soldiers erupted onto the surface from underground barracks, as if someone had kicked an ant-hill. They tried to stay on their feet as the island continued shaking and to stumble in our direction, carrying out the colonel’s orders, but few managed to remain upright for more than a handful of seconds at a time.
“Will Nari catch on to what’s happening?” asked Tessa.
“Unlikely,” said Brad’s voice in her ear. “Not unless I can reestablish our connection. Assuming Michelle can block all sensor readings from the area, he has no way to know things aren’t normal down here.”
All at once, in a last brilliant rainbow of blinding energy, the dome collapsed, and at the same instant the energies directed at it ceased, saving the island from destruction and all inhabitants from certain death.
“The dome is down!” shouted Tessa as the closest dozen of at least a hundred soldiers stationed on the island neared to within fifty yards of us and accelerated, now able to advance without the island trying to throw them off its back like a bucking bronco. “Repeat, the dome is down!”