V03 - The Pursuit of Diana Read online

  Chapter 1

  Juliet Parrish and Mike Donovan clung together for a long moment. Around them, the huge command center of the Visitors' Los Angeles Mother Ship was nearly silent. Where once thirty or more Visitor technicians worked at their various stations, now only two sat at their posts—Martin, the fifth columnist leader, was at the navigation console, and Barbara, his unofficial second-in-command, was at the communications center. Elias Taylor leaned against the blown-open entrance doors, grinning at his friends, while Elizabeth Maxwell calmly sat by the doomsday device which she alone, with her half-human, half-Visitor powers, had been able to turn off, thus saving the Earth from almost certain destruction.

  But for a moment Mike and Julie were not aware of even these few friends. Their need for each other was compounded by the emotional relief of victory, and heightened by the near catastrophe of global destruction. Right now Julie wanted to be alone in some bedroom with Mike, while he, to his own surprise, felt the need for her to comfort him. He had to be the strong one, though, so Julie could continue to be strong. The Visitors were gone, victory was theirs, but there was so much left to do toward putting the world back to rights again.

  Over at the entrance, Elias let his gaze wander around the command center. His only concern, once they returned to Earth, was how to fit himself back into society. The thought of returning to his old way of life—to burglary, drug dealing, and petty crime—had no appeal to him anymore. Anger had motivated him before, and frustration, but now he knew that the need for excitement, for thrills had also played a large part in shaping his career, and since he'd joined the rebels he'd had all the excitement anyone could want, enough to last him for the rest of his life. But he wasn't too worried. He knew he wasn't alone anymore. His friends, both human and Visitor, would see him through whatever trials remained.

  An opened wall hatch in the bulkhead beyond the doomsday machine seemed somehow significant. He looked again at these few people doing what needed to be done, and thought there should be one more.

  "Hey," he said at last, straightening up from his comfortable slouch. "Where's Diana?"

  Julie looked at him, and her face lost some of its calm. She disengaged herself from Mike's embrace and nodded at the open hatch. "I let her escape," she said simply.

  Mike stepped back and looked down at her in surprise. "But why?" he asked. At their stations, Barbara and Martin paused to look at her uncertainly.

  "I didn't want to," Julie said. Her voice carried a silent appeal for understanding. "I'm not really sure what happened. But while I was keeping her covered, it was almost as if part of me were back in the conversion chamber. Diana didn't speak, but I could hear her voice in my head. She kept saying, 'Don't move, be still, it will get you if you move.' My God, she wasn't talking. She was thinking at me! 1 wasn't expecting that. I was expecting her to run or attack or something, but she just sat there in the corner. By the time I realized what was happening, she was halfway through that hatch." She turned to Martin. "What was happening?" she asked. "Telepathy?"

  "I've never heard of anything like that," Martin said, "but then, I'm not a conversion technician."

  "She can't have gotten fai;" Mike Donovan said. "The toxin must have spread through the whole ship by now."

  "Except for here," Barbara pointed out. "There may be other pockets of clean air elsewhere, but that won't matter to Diana. That hatch leads to an escape shuttle. Mike, I don't think Diana's even on the ship anymore."

  The Pursuit of Diana

  "Damn," Elias said. Elizabeth continued to sit quietly.

  "She still can't get far," Martin said. "We're too far from I iarth now. The shuttle will never make it back there before its life support runs out. Those emergency shuttles are designed with very high power but limited range."

  "I don't like it," Mike said. "Especially the implication that she had some kind of telepathic control over Julie. Why didn't she try that on someone before?"

  "From what Julie's just told us," Barbara said, "it sounds like a by-product of the conversion process, and Julie's the only one of us herewho suffered that."

  "It was so strange," Julie said. "I wish we could find out more about it."

  "We'll have time after we get back home," Mike told her, reaching out for her again. "Right now this is our first order of business."

  Martin moved from console to console, reading dials, checking status lights. One particular panel held his attention.

  "What is it?" Elias Taylor asked, coming up behind him and looking over his shoulder.

  "Damage report," Martin said. "When we tried to get the doomsday device away from Earth, we accelerated too hard and too fast. Two of the engines went down in the attempt, and it looks like the others are failing too." He flipped switches, and the all but imperceptible humming of the drives stopped. "There's been some structural damage as well. These ships aren't designed to move through atmosphere except at a slow coast. We're going to have to make some repairs, or when we get back to Earth we'll just fall like a rock instead of floating over Los Angeles."

  "Can you fix it?" Mike Donovan asked.

  "Not by myself. It really takes a whole team to fly this thing. That's why we're having trouble now. If I'd had a full crew when we were pulling away from Earth, we probably could have avoided damaging the ship. But it's been a long time since I studied any engineering, and even with help, I'll need some technicians who specialize in engine maintenance."

  3

  "How about Willie?" Elias asked. "Or one of the other fifth columnists down in the docking bay?"

  "Willie's just a cryogenics worker," Martin said. "Scott might be able to help, but I think we're in big trouble."

  "It may not be as bad as it seems," Barbara said, looking up from a large display panel showing a diagram of the ship. "The ship's atmosphere monitor indicates that the toxin didn't spread as far as we'd thought." The others came over to see what she was talking about.

  "Each major section of the ship," she said, pointing at the display, "is represented diagrammatically. Here we are, and here are the crew's quarters, recreation area, the water hold, and so on. Each red section is contaminated, but see, that's only this area here." She pointed to the docking bay, the main corridors leading from it to the command center, and a section of cabins or offices off to one side of the main corridors. "Diana must have sealed off most of the ship, probably to keep us bottled up when we made our attack. But it also kept the rest of the ship free of contamination."

  "That means most of the crew probably survived," Martin said with obvious relief. "I have to admit I hated the thought of killing everybody like that. After all, most of the crew are only technicians and workers, people who just take orders."

  "Then surely some engine technicians have survived," Julie said.

  "But can we trust them?" Donovan asked.

  "I sure wouldn't," Elias Taylor said. "Think about it, Julie. If they had done to us what we've done to them, would we want to help them?"

  "That's a point," Julie said, "but more important is that even if we could trust them, we don't have enough antitoxin on board." She turned to Martin. "If we can find the technicians you need, can we get them to the engines without exposing them to contamination?"

  "I don't think so," he answered, examining the display panel. "See, the crew's quarters are here, the engineering section is here, and the only way is through this area, the central access area." That part of the display glowed bright red.

  "How many do we need?" Elias asked. "Maggie brought enough antitoxin for thirty to forty people."

  " That would be enough," Martin said, "if it hasn't already been used. But how would you get it to them?" The human li bels didn't understand his question
, but Barbara did.

  "Think about it," she said. "In order to give them the antitoxin, you'll have to unseal a portion of the ship. You can't get in to them otherwise. And if you unseal, the toxin will get lo them before you do."

  "Goddamn it!" Julie cried. "If it were just us, all right, we've been willing to die for our cause, though to come so i lose and not quite make it is almost more than I can stand. But there are ten thousand human beings in the holds of this ship. They'll die too if we don't get the ship back to Earth."

  "And I'd guess about two thousand of our crew are still alive," Barbara said, "if you figure that most of those who died from the toxin were soldiers and not workers."

  "There may be a way out," Martin suggested hesitantly. "The ship carried enough air to recycle three times. If we could get all the rebels and fifth columnists in the contaminated area up here to the command center and somehow seal off the entrance Elias blew, we could open the docking bay and flush the air out of that part of the ship. We'd have to use up a lot of our air reserves to make sure all the toxin was blown out, but if we can effect sufficient repairs to return to Los Angeles, we could pump more air aboard once we were back in Los Angeles's atmosphere."

  "But the toxin is all over the city by now," Elias said. "Not counting the smog, the air there wouldn't do you any good."

  "The toxin wouldn't have drifted that high up," Mike Donovan reassured him. "At least not yet. Most of the toxin released by the balloons will be in the lower two or three miles of the atmosphere. We could put the ship out beyond the prevailing winds, maybe somewhere in the north Pacific where the air will be clean for at least a year."

  "I think it's the only chance we've got," Barbara said. "But if we're going to do it, we'd better get started. With all engines shut down, we don't have power to keep our life support going for long."

  "And there're all our friends down in the docking bay,"

  Julie said. "God, they must be wondering what's been happening up here."

  "I can talk to them from here," Barbara said, going to the master communications panel.

  "Even it we flush out all the toxin in the air," Martin said, "we're going to have trouble with the stuff that will be trapped in the clothing of those who died in the corridors."

  "Maybe we can move all the bodies into one of these sections," Donovan said, pointing to a red area near the main corridor, "and then seal it off completely."

  "Yes, that's possible. And here," Martin pointed to a section of the corridor not far from the command center, "that's a security door, so we can keep the atmosphere in here while the rest of this area is being flushed."

  "But wait," Juliet said. "Our people will have the toxin all over their clothes too."

  "Nobody said decontamination would be simple," Martin said, "but we've got other uniforms, and we can set up a shower system."

  "I've got the docking bay on the screen," Barbara said, and they all turned to see what was going on down there.

  William sat beside Harmony Moore's body in one of the compartments of the shuttle.

  "Come on," Sancho Gomez said from the door, "there's nothing more you can do."

  "I know," William said. His voice was flat, the strange resonance peculiar to the Visitors somehow subdued by his grief. "But I told her I'd never leave her."

  "She'll be all right here," Sancho said, coming over to lay a reassuring hand on William's shoulder. "We have wounded friends out there who need our help."

  William sighed, then nodded and got to his feet. Leaning on Sancho for support, he went with him out into the docking bay.

  The red powder of the toxin stained every surface and hung in the air like a cloud though it was now slowly sifting down to cover the deck with a layer of crimson dust. Rebels and fifth columnists were moving among those of their friends who had fallen to enemy fire. They had taken surprisingly few casual-lies, but not all were unscathed. The wounded were being made comfortable until some kind of first aid could be brought to them.

  Speakers high in the walls came to life. "Attention all rebels and fifth columnists," a female voice said. "This is Barbara. We have taken control of the ship, and the doomsday bomb has been deactivated. But we have more work to do." Quickly she described the situation and the rough plan that had been worked out.

  Caleb Taylor and Maggie Blodgett came over to join Sancho ind William as they listened to Barbara's report. "I wish I knew if Elias was all right," Caleb said.

  "We'll find out soon enough," Maggie reassured him. "Right now we've got to get everybody up to the command center."

  "I'll get right on it," Sancho said, and went off to organize litter crews to carry the wounded while William closed the shuttle hatch. With Caleb and Maggie supervising, they soon had all the humans and Visitors in order.

  "I don't like this," Caleb said. "How can we trust those engineers Barbara says we need?"

  "I don't know," Maggie said, "but I don't think we have any choice." She turned to the others. "All right," she called out, "let's get a move on." Then the speakers came on once more, but the voice was Juliet Parrish's this time.

  "Maggie," Julie's voice said, "can you hear me?"

  "Yes," Maggie said to the air as the rebels filed past her.

  "Good," Julie said. "How much antitoxin is left?"

  "I think about ten or fifteen doses. It's on the shuttle."

  "Bring it with you," Juliet told hei; "and hurry. With our power down, we won't be able to breathe ourselves after a while."

  Maggie hurried back to the shuttle and went inside. She had to pass through the compartment where Harmony's body lay in order to get to the pitifully small suppy of antitoxin. She got the pills from their storage place and came back. She couldn't help herself; she had to pause a moment with Harmony.

  "We knew each other for so short a time," she said softly. She wiped a red smear from the now cold face. "But you didn't die in vain—I hope." Then she hurried out to follow the others.

  The scene at Visitor Headquarters in Los Angeles was doubly chaotic. Bodies of Visitor soldiers littered the ground, mingled with those of the few rebels who had fallen. A thin red haze hung like a pall at knee height, slowly dissipating across the grounds. At the same time, the rebels who had discovered the cache of champagne and other fine beverages that Steven, the Visitor security chief, had kept on hand for his human collaborators, were having a wild, impromptu party. Even the wounded were joining in.

  But not Robert Maxwell. He and a few other rebels were checking the bodies of their fallen companions, finding those who still lived and carrying them to one of the trucks. Robert was anxious to get back to the lighthouse rebel base, concerned for those who were still there, and especially his three daughters. Robin, he knew, would be a particular problem, at least until Elizabeth, his half-human granddaughter, was returned safely—if she ever was. And there was a lot of work still ahead of them all putting their lives back together.

  Inside, in Steven's control room, several rebels stood examining the wall of computers, communicators, and other equipment the Visitors had installed. Steven's body had been unceremoniously pushed to one side. Jason Cunningham, a tall slender man in his late forties, went from panel to panel, examining the dials, the readouts, the controls and displays.

  "We've got to keep this from being destroyed," he told his two companions. "If we can figure out how all this stuff works, we my gain something from the Visitors after all."

  "You're the electrical engineer;" Ian Browne said. Not as tail as Jason, he was even more slender, and rapidly balding in spite of not yet being thirty. "All I know is how to fix TV sets."

  "Then you know enough not to damage anything while we take this apart," Jason told him.

  "Can't we leave it until later?" Markos Dimitrios asked. The shortest of the three, his Greek features were darkly handsome. "I want to go out and join the party."

  If we don't do something to protect this equipment," Jason said, "it will be destroyed by vandals. You saw how eager the
others were to rip it apart. People won't want anything of the Visitors' to survive, so either we set a guard or try to take as much as we can with us."

  "Well, I'm not going to stay here any longer than I have to," Ian said. "I've got to get back to my TV store and find out if toy family's okay."

  " Then let's get to work," Jason said. "We'll need screwdrivers, wire cutters, and wrenches." He turned to Markos.

  You said there was a shop of some kind in the basement, didn't you?"

  "Right. I'll go get whatever I can find."

  "Great. Now, Ian," Jason said as Markos hurried off, "some of these devices just slip into mounts. Be careful with the plugs and stack everything over on that table. When Markos comes back, you show him what to do. I've got to get ,i truck and some help in carrying this stuff out." He left the man to his task and went out onto the balcony.

  Jason went over to the stone railing, where the body of Mike's mother; Eleanor Dupres, still lay, a look of surprise on her face. Below him he could see none of the rebel leaders. Only revelers were visible. He called down to one.

  "Find Robert Maxwell," he said. "I need some help up here."

  "Haven't seen him," the man called back, his voice thick with drink.

  "Then get Ham Tyler," Jason said.

  "Haven't seen him either."

  "Well, go looking for him, man," Jason Cunningham said as he hurried toward the stairs. "You," he called out to another rebel who was talking with two women. "Can you back a truck up here?"

  "Sure thing," the man said and trotted off.

  "What's up?" one of the women asked.

  "We're going to save some Visitor technology," Jason told her. "They left a lot of stuff up here, and I'm going to need help getting it out." He started back to the control room, the two women coming up the stairs behind him. __

  Inside he found Markos and Ian working at disassembling the mass of electronics. Two dozen or more devices were already stacked on the table by the door, their wires dangling and tangled. Each piece of equipment was only two inches thick, typical of the compactness of Visitor electronics.