Extinction Machine

Chapter Forty-nine

VanMeer Castle

Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Sunday, October 20, 10:15 a.m.

Howard Shelton paced back and forth while Mr. Bones watched. The big plasma screen was blank now. Yuina Hoshino had gone back to work, leaving them with her observations and their shared fears.

“She can’t be right,” said Howard for maybe the tenth time.

Mr. Bones did not comment. They’d already wrangled through this. If Yuina was right, then sixty years of the Majestic Project was an exercise in futility, and M3’s belief that they were well ahead of the competition was so much vain fluff.

That was a problem, though not at all in the way Yuina thought it was. To her the Project was everything. Her entire adult life had been building toward this.

“How come she didn’t look more upset?” asked Mr. Bones. “She seemed to take it pretty well.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” countered Howard. “I know her and I could see it in her eyes. Two seconds after she got off the phone with us I guarantee you she was curled into a fetal position, screaming her lungs out. If this is all what it looks like, then we have to be really careful with her.” He paused and made a mouth while he considered that. Then he snatched up a phone and made a call to one of his people at her lab, advising them to keep a close eye on Dr. Hoshino. “And I mean close. She just got a pretty hard knock and we have to make sure she doesn’t do something unfortunate.”

He ended the call and flung himself into his chair.

“What does this do to us?” asked Mr. Bones. “After that … they’re definitely never going to let the air show go on.”

Howard chewed a crumb of skin off of his thumb.

“I want like hell to believe it’s those f*cking Chinese,” he muttered. “I have half a mind to call that prick Admiral Xiè and shove this in his face.”

“He’ll deny it,” said Mr. Bones. “He’s a backstabbing shit and he’ll deny it was them.”

“Son of a bitch takes our money and then does this.”

“If it’s him,” said Bones. “If it’s the Chinese.”

“It has to be.”

“This and the president?”

“Has to be,” insisted Howard.

They sat in silence, thinking about it. Howard could almost hear his plans crashing to ruin around him.

“If it is,” said Howard slowly, “then they have to know where we stand with the Project. I can build a case for that, Bonesy, I can make sense of that. If they had a spy inside our Project, then they’d know what we have planned for the air show.”

“Had planned,” Bones corrected sourly.

“Had planned, whatever. If they know that, then this was an attempt to trump us. To make the statement that we’d better not get any fancy ideas because they’re already up and running and ready to kick us in the nuts.”

“Okay … so what?”

Howard got up and walked over to the wall of curtains. He touched a button and the curtains parted and slid away to reveal huge glass windows beyond which was an enormous limestone cavern. Far below, standing on three steel struts, connected to computer systems by a hundred pendulous cables, was a massive triangular craft. Dozens of technicians swarmed like ants around the thing. Dangling above the center of the machine was an engine made from gleaming metal, supported by chains, swaying slightly. Dozens of similar engines, each in various stages of completion, stood on metal trestle tables that lined one wall. Howard leaned on the windowsill and put his forehead against the cold glass. After a moment, Mr. Bones got up and came to stand next to him.

“You know, Bonesy,” said Howard Shelton very softly, “we might be going about this the wrong way. I think we are trying to win a battle instead of going straight for it and winning the whole damn war.”