Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (30 page)

The answer to one of her many questions resolved in her mind. She knew where the 1977 Wow! Signal had come from—the future.
Her
future. Her
present
. Jarrod sent the signal. Just moments ago. And he had sent the signal before. Each time, it contained a modification. A refinement.

But they were past that point. If further refinements had been sent, they had
already
been sent. They were beyond that point in time. She was now who she would always be, but she had no idea what that meant. Had no idea how that had changed things, or how many times this scene had played out, subtly changing with each transmission. How many different versions of herself had stood here before, watching the signal be sent? How many had failed to get this far? She’d barely survived the journey this time.
Maybe this is the first time I made it...

If Sophia and Jarrod were any indication, she would be the only one who remembered who she had been before.
I’m new
, she thought, perhaps different enough from the others that the final change was not lost in a stream of new memories.

“Now what?” she asked, even more curious than before.

Jarrod’s smile broadened. “Now, we go on the offensive.” He set the computer down on the edge of the platform and opened an e-mail server.

I trust you
.

Noah’s parting words echoed in her head. She made a promise. She asked him to trust her, and he had. “Who sent the message?”

Jarrod didn’t look up. “You still haven’t figured it out?”

“I understand that you—that we—just sent the Wow! Signal, but where did it come from? Who modified it?”

“Nobody modified it,” Jarrod said with a chuckle. “It is how it was meant to be. And we are where we were meant to be. It’s that simple.”

He doesn’t know. How could he? He doesn’t remember any other version of history than the current.
There may have been a past where he knew the source, but the necessity to receive direct orders has been erased by the compulsion built into his DNA over unknown numbers of revisions.

Sophia took a step toward her, opening her arms as if offering an earnest embrace. “Jenna, it’s the Earth that gains, and all life on it, even humanity.”

Part of Jenna agreed wholeheartedly, but she knew those feelings had been programmed. They were powerful—stronger than before—but the knowledge of her past self buoyed her, gave her the desire to not be a slave to some mysterious coder of human DNA. Someone who had also figured out how to send a signal back in time.

Nurture is more powerful than nature
.
I raised you well
.

For all his fatherly wisdom, Noah had never anticipated that she would be faced with a choice of this magnitude.

Jarrod finished composing his e-mail—a very short message—and was populating the address list. Jenna saw eleven recipients, eleven of her brothers and sisters. She wondered if there were still others out there like her, just awakening to the knowledge, or some who had perhaps refused to embrace the apocalyptic prophecy of their teacher—their creator.

She wondered how many had been wiped out by the Agency’s purge.

Maybe it is better to simply wipe the slate clean
.

But she had made a promise.

“If everything you say is true,” she persisted. “Why did we have to send this message back to space? It doesn’t make sense.”

While she now had some of the answers—though she still couldn’t conceive why the signal was being shot into space—she was hoping the two of them might question their actions. Might open their eyes to the truth.

Sophia reached out for her arm, gently, shaking her head like a disappointed parent. “Jenna—”

Their beliefs were unshakable. Without knowledge of their true pasts, they could never be convinced to fight the desires being shouted at them by their very DNA.

Without waiting for an answer, Jenna leaped forward and seized the computer from Jarrod’s hand before he could hit ‘Send.’

60

6:07 p.m.

The move caught Jarrod off guard. Jenna snapped the screen down, and with a hard pull, she yanked it free of the connection to the receiver network. Then, she spun on her heel and bolted for the door.

Sophia moved to intercept her, but even with reflexes enhanced by superior DNA, her shock at this unexpected turn of events hampered her response. Jenna stiff-armed her into a wall, tore the door open and burst out onto the elevated landing.

Despite having the element of surprise on her side, Jenna was mired in guilt. She felt like a shoplifter, caught at the exit of a department store, hoping to outrun the security guards, while knowing full well that every detail of the crime had been recorded on video. She had just committed an unforgivable act of treason against her own kind. She was an apostate, reviling the creator’s message, clinging to the false gospel of human ingenuity and dooming the entire planet to extinction. Worse, what she had done would probably amount to nothing more than an inconvenience for Jarrod. She had failed the stop the really important part of the plan. The signal had gone out. She and those like her had been what...upgraded? What were they capable of now, that they weren’t before? And really, what had she accomplished aside from revealing her betrayal? Jarrod could send his message to the others from a cell phone. She had simply delayed the inevitable.

No
, she thought. The computer had the names of all the clones. Cort could use that to track them down and—

Hunt them? Kill them?

—stop them from carrying out their planned terror attacks, or at the very least, use the information to prevent any successful terror attacks from setting the superpowers at each other’s throats.

The mental turmoil dulled her edges. Just as she extended a foot toward the first step, Sophia managed to reach out and snag a handful of her hair. Jenna’s head snapped back and her feet flew out from under her, causing her to slam down hard on the metal treads. The fall tore her loose from Sophia’s grasp, but that was about the only good thing to come out of it. The impact sent a jolt of pain through Jenna’s torso, driving the breath from her lungs. Worse, she started sliding down the flight, each step gouging into her skin as she scraped her way lower. Above her, the entire staircase trembled as Sophia descended.

Hugging the laptop to her chest, Jenna threw her free hand out, trying to snag the guardrail to arrest her slide, but before she could do so, her feet hit the landing near the elevation gears. Sophia seemed to be gliding down the steps, her feet barely touching as she made huge bounds. With an excruciating effort, Jenna hauled herself erect and started across the landing, but before she could take two steps, Sophia was there.

So fast.

She darted in front of Jenna, blocking her access to the descending stairs. “Jenna, don’t do this.” There was anger in the woman’s tone, but something else, too. Understanding. “We all had to deal with this. It will pass, and then you’ll see that this is what has to be done. Trust us. Trust
yourself
.”

Trust?
She had asked Noah to trust her. Mercy had trusted her, surrendering herself to Cort’s custody just so Jenna could get this far. Right now, Jenna was putting her trust in that inner voice of reason that
didn’t
belong to the teacher speaking through her DNA. It was the ability Noah had instilled in her to detect falsehood, to know when something wasn’t right.

But what if she was wrong?

Jenna gripped the laptop in both hands, raising it as if preparing to swat a fly. “If you don’t move,” she said in a low menacing voice, “I’ll go through you.”

Sophia shook her head slowly. Jenna saw the other woman’s eyes dart back and forth, and then settle on the computer like a compass needle pointing true north. Sophia might have been older and more experienced with her gifts, but Jenna had been trained to look for the signs that would forecast an attack, and she had been taught how to fight back. As if catching a glimpse of the future, Jenna saw Sophia start to move and knew exactly what the woman was going to do. As Sophia reached for the computer, Jenna used the laptop like a shield, deflecting the grasping hands. She side-stepped, allowing Sophia’s momentum to carry her forward. As Sophia passed her, Jenna spun on her heel, one leg extended, to sweep Sophia’s legs out from under her.

Sophia went down hard. The landing shuddered with the impact. Jenna started for the descending stairs, but Sophia was back up in a heartbeat, and with a feral growl made more fierce by the mask of blood streaming from split lips, she charged again. The woman moved with inhuman speed, but Jenna, somehow, moved faster. She dodged back, a reflex drilled into her from hours spent at the
dojo
, and Sophia shot past again.

In a sickening premonition, Jenna saw what was about to happen. She was powerless to prevent it. Sophia hit the descending rail at an angle and flipped over it, out into empty space. Her head hit the hard metal floor on her way over and when Jenna saw the woman’s face again, her eyes were closed. Unconscious. Totally unaware that her life was about to end.

Jenna felt as if something had been ripped out of her.

The unconscious Sophia did not cry out as she fell, but a scream from above echoed the pain in Jenna’s heart.

“No!” Jarrod’s shout was punctuated by a dull thud.

Jenna tore her eyes away from the bloody stain on the immaculate white rail and looked up to see Jarrod on the upper landing. His face, so like her own, was twisted with grief and rage, but when he met Jenna’s eyes, the emotions hardened into deadly resolve. With agonizing deliberateness, he reached under his jacket and drew a gun.

The sight of the pistol broke Jenna out of her paralysis, and she lurched into motion. Passing the red streaks that marked the spot where her sister had fallen, she headed down the stairs. A bullet struck the rail in front of her, throwing up a shower of yellow sparks. Jenna kept going, one hand resting on the rail, the other clutching the computer. Her feet tapped out a quick staccato rhythm, but she took the steps cautiously, one at a time, resisting the urge to bound as Sophia had done. A fall now would be disastrous. Jarrod held his fire, and Jenna knew without looking that he was giving chase. Even if he didn’t need the laptop, he would want revenge.

Before she could reach the lower landing, she felt the vibrations of Jarrod’s feet on the flight above her.

“Jenna! Stop! I
will
shoot you!”

She ignored the threat, reached the landing and pivoted onto the final staircase. Sophia lay at the base of the stairs, unmoving, like so much roadkill. Jenna felt a pang of self-loathing as she leapt from the penultimate step, vaulting over the body. The welcome solidity of the desert floor beneath her feet gave her the impetus to push on.

The Jeep was just twenty yards away, but as she turned toward it, Jarrod’s pistol barked again. Bullets peppered the dirt in her path, too close for comfort, and she peeled off, seeking refuge beneath the dish.

Jarrod wasn’t going to let her reach the Jeep. But the track maintenance truck was a lot closer.

Jarrod fired again as soon as she broke from cover, but he had not yet divined her intention. The shot sent up a spray of dust that would have been directly in her path if she had run for the Jeep. Before he could correct his aim, she reached the truck and slid inside.

The keys were in the ignition. That was the good news. The bad news was that the truck was facing the base of the antenna and there was no way to turn it around. Jenna started the engine, threw the transmission into ‘reverse’ and glanced out the window toward Jarrod.

He strode toward her, eyes calculating, weapon aimed, ready to kill. Behind him, the dish loomed massive, blotting out the solid blue sky—but not all of it. What Jenna saw above the dish froze her in place and kept her from hitting the gas. Her eyes widened, tracking the object in the sky. “Ten minutes,” she said, realizing that Cort’s countdown had finished.

A single drone peeled away from a trail of smoke leading straight toward her and Jarrod, who must have seen the surprise in her eyes, and their direction.

Without missing a step, Jarrod looked back over his shoulder. The small missile streaked toward them. There was no engine roar as the projectile outpaced its own sound waves. It would arrive silently, leaving nothing alive to hear its power.

Jarrod raised his free hand toward the missile. His fingers twitched, and then he yanked his arm down, pulling the missile down with it as though he had reached out and plucked it from the sky.

The missile’s new trajectory brought it down into the far side of the massive dish. She felt the impact shake the ground beneath her. The telescope’s dish shattered and burst, metal panels spiraling away from a fiery explosion. And then the sound, a rattling roar, pulsed through her body. She responded to the concussion by going rigid and slamming her foot down on the gas pedal.

As the vehicle moved out into the open, Jenna watched the gigantic radio telescope crumble as a column of black smoke rose up from its core.

Rounds peppered the truck’s frame as Jarrod’s focus shifted back to Jenna. The passenger window shattered, showering Jenna with tiny particles, but Jarrod didn’t have a clear shot at her. In a few seconds, the truck was rolling backward. Jenna felt the steering wheel turn beneath her light grip, and she had to resist the urge to seize control. The truck was designed to follow the rails. If she tried to steer, it could jump the track.

It also meant there was nothing she could do to avoid the shards of metal debris now raining down around her. While many of the large metal panels that made up the telescope’s dish fluttered awkwardly down from above, just as many descended like giant throwing stars, impaling the desert floor alongside a cloud of screws, nuts, bolts and smaller, sheared bits of framing.

All around her, the desert became littered by debris. Several of the large panels fell alongside the backwards-speeding truck, while one tore into the tracks right in front of her, where the truck had been just a second before. The truck shook with a shriek of metal as a four-foot metal beam impaled the roof and slid into the passenger seat cushion. Jenna shouted in surprise, but never let off the gas, and soon, she was out of range of the still-falling debris.

The truck swung onto the mainline, its rear pointing back toward the hub. Jenna pushed the gas pedal a little harder. The engine revved loudly and the tachometer jumped into the red, but the speedometer refused to climb past thirty miles per hour. To her front, she saw Jarrod running for the Jeep, one hand raised up toward the deadly falling debris, which somehow steered clear of him.

How is he doing that?
Jenna wondered, but even as the thought crossed her mind, a single word came to her: psychokinesis—the ability to affect the physical world without actual contact. Better known as telekinesis, she always thought the ability was the stuff of science fiction and crackpots. Yet Jarrod seemed to have mastered the ability.

But I can’t do that
, she thought, and then she realized that she was no longer the same Jenna she remembered. Maybe she could? As she searched her memory, she gasped. Had she been using psychokinesis all along? It could explain her influence over people, the drone crash in the Everglades, the impossible wall jump in Miami and the way Cort’s men lowered their weapons against their will. She had this ability before, she realized, but was it stronger now?

Movement pulled Jenna from her thoughts. and she whispered, “Shit.” In her haste to reach the antenna, it had not occurred to her to take the Jeep’s keys. As the Jeep lurched into motion, she looked behind her at the miniscule buildings of the VLA headquarters. How far out was she? Three or four miles?

Plenty of time for Jarrod to intercept her, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to fight back.