Chapter 102 - Midnight Convergences
The climb up Spur Nine was a march through frozen purgatory.
A vicious northwest wind had kicked up, driving needle-sharp pellets of sleet through the pines. Jared and Marcus moved in silence, their white snow-camo smocks blending into the drifts, their boots crunching softly over the hard crust.
Below them, the lights of the valley had completely flickered out. The atmospheric ionization caused by the descending platform was already bleeding into the power grid, tripping transformers and plunging the small towns along the highway into absolute, freezing darkness.
"Look at the ridge," Marcus whispered through his comm-piece, dropping to one knee behind a deadfall spruce.
Through his night-vision goggles, Jared saw the tower. The old timber-service relay station—a ninety-foot steel lattice structure—stood against the starless sky like a rusted skeleton. At its base, a small generator was chattering away, spewing a plume of gray exhaust into the wind.
Clustered around the equipment shack were four men. They weren't wearing makeshift winter gear. They were dressed in pressurized cold-weather flight suits, operating a portable satellite uplink dish aimed at an elevation of forty-two degrees north-northwest.
"That’s the ground-control team," Marcus murmured. "They’re transmitting the descent telemetry. If they keep painting the shop with that laser guide, the capsule will impact directly on top of Bay Four."
"What’s in that capsule, Marcus?" Jared asked, his breath misting behind his fleece mask. "Why would anyone spend millions of dollars and risk forty counts of treason to drop an ancient satellite on a repair shop?"
"It’s not what’s in the capsule," Marcus said grimly. "It’s what Arthur put inside it before it launched. Arthur wasn't an engineer for the military, Jared. He was the chief metallurgist for the Manhattan Project’s second division. In 1958, they ran an experiment to forge synthetic heavy elements in zero-gravity orbit. They created a refined isotope of Californium—stable, compact, and worth roughly forty million dollars an ounce on the black market. Arthur stole the orbital return keys, locked the recovery sequence to his own private coordinates, and buried the receiver under his shop."
"He didn't steal it for money," Jared realized, the puzzle pieces slamming together in his mind. "He stole it so they wouldn't use it to build a second generation of dirty warheads."
"And your sister sold the location to a private military consortium that’s been looking for Arthur’s cache for fifty years," Marcus finished. "They don't care about you. They don't care about the valley. They just want the core."
A sharp metallic crack rang out above the roar of the wind.
At the base of the tower, one of the flight-suited technicians threw a red toggle switch. A high-intensity violet strobe began to pulse at the top of the mast, cutting through the snowstorm like a beacon in an abyss.
*COUNTDOWN TO SURFACE CONVERGENCE: 24 HOURS, 15 MINUTES, 00 SECONDS.*
May you like
"Take the generator first," Jared whispered, lifting his rifle. "We cut their power, we blind the beacon."
***
