“Yes, you are welcome to eat at the buffet table,” Christina told him. “It’s free.”
Without another word, Sketch made a beeline for the food.
A kind-faced older woman made her way over to the group and spoke with them for a while. Yes, they all said, the classes had been very interesting. They were very much enjoying their stay at the ICIC. They were excited to be part of the program. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Smiling, the woman moved on.
This conversation repeated itself with a man in a gray business suit and then again with a man in an Army uniform, whom Mackenzie identified as a “full-bird colonel,” which sounded important even though the others didn’t know what it meant.
As time wore on and no one else approached them, the students drifted apart, Kaitlyn and Mackenzie joining Sketch at the buffet table, and Daniel wandering toward the punch bowl. Sam walked out to the observation deck to take in the view, but it didn’t seem like there was very much to see until she noticed the telescopes along the outer railing. She was heading that way when she saw Rush step outside to join her, so she waited for him to catch up.
“View’s nice,” Rush commented.
“Of the water, I guess,” Sam said. “But the launch pad’s so far away you can hardly see it at all.”
“Yeah, a pamphlet inside says it’s a safety precaution. Even the closest setup at the space center itself is more than two miles away from the pad.”
“Oh. I guess I thought we’d be closer.”
“I was surprised too,” Rush admitted. “It’ll still be cool to watch, though.”
“Yeah, at least they have the telescopes. You want to check them out?”
“Sure,” Rush agreed.
They waited for a rather portly gentleman to finish using the one in front of them. He looked through the eyepiece a few moments longer and then relinquished the device, smiling politely before making his way back toward the meeting room.
“You go ahead,” Rush said, waving Sam forward.
“Thanks.” Sam smiled back at him, bending down a little to look through the eyepiece and then standing up very slowly, turning toward Rush with a haunted look in her eye.
“Tick-Tock? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Houston,” she said, backing away from the device so Rush could look through it for himself, “we have a problem.”
Rush took a quick step forward and looked through the telescope.
The magnification was spectacular. The launch pad filled the optics, giving him a perfect view of the rocket that was about to launch Orion into space—and wrapped around its hull, just as clear as day, the sinister form of an enormous, pitch-black dragon.
58
Orion
“Ammu?”
“Yes, Rush? Samantha? Is something wrong?” They found him inside the meeting room, chatting amiably with an attractive middle-aged woman about the military strategies of Alexander the Great.
“No! No, nothing’s wrong. We just wanted you to see the launch pad. Through the telescopes. It’s very exciting.” Rush gave Ammu a meaningful stare.
“Very exciting,” Sam echoed.
“Of course,” Ammu said.
He turned to excuse himself from the conversation, but the woman had already taken advantage of their arrival to disappear into the crowd, apparently preferring less historical chit-chat. Rush ignored Ammu’s look of disappointment, grabbing the man by the sleeve and shepherding him out to the observation deck, practically shoving him toward the nearest telescope.
“Rush? What—”
“Look,” Rush interrupted him, pointing imperiously to the device while Sam stood by his side, nodding adamantly.
Ammu looked through the viewfinder and then stood up slowly.
“I believe it is time for us to move to the seventh-floor observation deck. Help me gather the others, if you would be so kind.” He said it easily, even cheerfully, as though there were nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary about either the request or the reason behind it.
“How much time until the launch?” Rush asked.
“Thirteen minutes,” Sam replied, her voice tense, the stress of their predicament welling up within her as she fought to maintain a casual front.
Gathering the others and moving upstairs: three minutes. Performing a summoning: one minute, minimum. That leaves nine minutes to figure out what to summon and use it to get rid of that thing, if we even can.
Sam’s mind performed the time calculations as naturally as breathing, whether she wanted to or not. As it happened, she did not, in this particular case, want to know that they had nine minutes to work with before the Orion test flight—the manned Orion test flight—exploded on the launch pad, or worse. But she was right, nonetheless.
It took exactly three minutes to gather everyone back together, move up to the seventh floor, explain the situation to the others, and post Christina at the door so they wouldn’t be interrupted. The high, white terrace was the perfect size for a summoning, but that was the only thing Sam could think of that they had going in their favor, which didn’t seem like much under the circumstances.
“We’ve never summoned anything even remotely big enough to fight that thing,” Rush blurted out as soon as they were alone.
“We have one minute to summon something and another nine minutes to do something with it,” Sam said. “That’s it. So whatever we’re going to do, we have to do it fast.”
“How do you know it will wait until the launch?” Daniel demanded, his voice rising in desperation. “How do you know it’s not going to just rip the Orion to shreds like three seconds from now?”
“It won’t,” Sam declared. “Nine minutes. Trust me. We have time to fix it. I know we have time to fix it. I just don’t know how yet, but we have to figure it out. Now. Planning time counts, by the way.”
“It doesn’t matter what we decide to bring if we don’t have the pattern,” Kaitlyn protested. “It’s not like Ammu brought his book with him to this thing. The point was not to let them know what we can do!”
“I do not have the book,” Ammu confirmed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sam almost yelled. “You’re not hearing me. I’m telling you, I know we have time to fix it—with what we have, here with us, right now—but we won’t for much longer if we don’t figure this out. Come on, people. What can we summon that has a chance against that thing?”
“This,” Sketch said bluntly, and he held out his art pad, pointing to the page he had been searching for. It was his drawing of Alexander’s tomb, but it wasn’t the tomb he was pointing at. It was the white dragon, standing on its rear legs next to the pyramid, facing down the black dragon on the other side.
“Yes!” Mackenzie shouted. “Sketch! You’re a genius!”