“I’m not sure where you’re going with this, young lady,” Bingham told her, “but if the assault is so impossible then maybe you can explain why the latest surveillance imagery taken by our spy aircraft—all satellite communications are down—shows North Korea doubling its level of naval and air force activity.”

  She tried not to sound bitchy when she replied. “Maybe they’re afraid of an attack of some kind. Maybe it’s nothing more than a precaution. Isn’t that what we’re doing? Maybe they’re just reacting to our maneuvers.”

  Bingham responded with a crooked smile. “Maybe isn’t a word we like to build our national defense posture on.”

  When challenged, Maggie’s response was always to counterattack. It frequently got her in trouble. “Well, I kinda hope it’s not a word you’d go to war over, either—man.” Aware that she was verging dangerously close to the debate society equivalent of self-asphyxiation, she cut off that line of discussion.

  “Admiral. General. Major. Sir.”

  Fortunately for any future career prospects, her initial impression of Bingham had been correct. He really was a very nice admiral. Unexpectedly, he smiled tolerantly down at her.

  “How nice to be young,” he observed, his expression deadpan.

  “We’re listening, Ms. Madsen.” Keller gave her his full attention. “All ears. Fill ’em.”

  She turned to the deputy director. “Look, you said it. The signal pattern’s evolving, changing. Mutating. It’s learning. Everybody needs to move past the notion that simple Fourier transforms are at work here and start thinking quantum mechanics. We’re not dealing with the usual speeds here—we’re talking instantaneous cyber-cognizant adaptive algorithms.”

  The deputy director shook his head, not believing. Not wanting to believe. “Come on, there’s nothing on Earth that complex, capable of that kind of evolution. There’s nothing that can simultaneously process so many complex adaptations across an entire program.”

  “Yeah there is,” she shot back. “An organism. Like maybe the still-theoretical DNA-based computer. I know it sounds crazy, but—”

  “Okay.” Bingham cut her off. “I’ve heard enough.” He turned to go.

  Having committed herself, Maggie saw no option but to press her case as far as she could take it. “Look, let my team study the signal pattern—assuming there is one. You can let us do it or you can stand there looking down your noses at me, but you don’t have time for both so choose.”

  Keller eased himself between her and the increasingly intolerant deputy director and the preoccupied retreating admiral. “That’s enough. We have senior analysts for that kind of work, Margaret, and given the sensitivity of—”

  “Maggie,” she interrupted him, making no effort to keep the irritation out of her voice. “I told you—it’s on my birth certificate.”

  Keller paid no attention. “Now, if you find proof to support your theory, I’m available and happy to hear it. But if you don’t work a little harder on that brain-to-mouth filter, I am taking you out, and you’ll find yourself back evaluating water flow statistics for the lower Potomac.” Turning, he joined the deputy director in following Bingham toward the exitway.

  Maggie watched them go. She would have been really upset and angry, except she didn’t feel she could afford the time …

  There were enough military police and civilian police vehicles surrounding a parked Air Force One that morning to mount an invasion of a small third-world country. But they were only at an air force base in Oklahoma. Forensics specialists swarmed the interior of the plane, hunting for clues to the inexplicable. Three people had been murdered, their thoracic arteries severed by razor-sharp metal discs, and no one on board had the slightest clue how it had been done.

  What the bevy of experts was looking for, though none of them could imagine it, was presently scuttling across the damp tarmac. It halted beside one of the many parked police cars. Except that this particular machine was not a police car. It only looked like one of Oklahoma’s finest’s law-enforcement vehicles. Having adopted the name Barricade, it was—like the crawling spider-thing—also a Decepticon.

  Barely audible bursts of precisely modulated sound passed between the cruiser-that-wasn’t and the insectoid-thing. What would have sounded like pure noise to a human was actually complex communication, too rapid and advanced for any primate brain to comprehend.

  “The virus will activate soon,” the insectoid-shape that had taken the name Frenzy declared. It was sufficiently advanced to express satisfaction.

  The passenger-side door opened on the transformed police cruiser, and a sonic reply issued from the nearest speaker. “It is all well and good that the intrusion goes according to plan, but what about the Cube?”

  Flexing metal legs, Frenzy hopped effortlessly up into the empty front seat. Their attention wholly focused on one another, on their work, and on the giant plane parked in their midst, none of the humans was looking in the direction of the “empty” car.

  “They isolated the relevant network,” Frenzy replied in response to Barricade’s query, “but not before I found this.”

  A thin metal wire extruded from the body of the multilegged Decepticon and jacked into a port on the dash-mounted “police” computer. It took only a second for the designated data to transfer. Had the handover of information taken place at humanoid speed, the name WITWICKY, ARCHIBALD, CPT. would have been among the words that would have appeared on the car’s computer screen.

  Staying alive, the computer and its monitor ran a complementary search/scan of their own. Almost instantly, the name Frenzy had provided was matched to several newspaper articles from 1897. The unfortunate captain’s face was among the graphics that made a split-second appearance. So were several photographs of symbols that were alien to anything on Earth—but not to the disguised police cruiser and its spidery passenger.

  The search continued, going worldwide, seeking any match, any bond, any link. It found one—on a basic eBay page. Ignoring the accompanying image of the young human, both machines focused their attention on a pair of battered, badly scored spectacles. The extraordinarily primitive dual-lens artificial sight-correcting device interested them not in the least. But the symbologic code that had been burned microscopically into the two lenses interested them very much indeed.

  Conveniently, the simple coded page provided the physical locality at which the owner of the page and the spectacles resided. It was all too easy. While neither Barricade nor Frenzy was of a mechanoidal type programmed to express thankfulness, they were both quite capable of appreciating the apparent minimal amount of resources that were going to be required to recover the object of their search.

  “Shall I summon the others?” the insectoid-shape hissed electronically.

  “Not yet.” Being of a higher order of competence, it was left to the morph that presently held the form of a police cruiser to make the applicable decision. “This world’s defensive mechanisms are crude and of an extremely low order of individual intelligence, but those who direct them possess, in their singularly primitive way, some slight degree of competence. And the devices themselves can be deadly. We cannot risk exposure until we know the location of the Cube. For now it is best that we sustain the masquerade and remain in disguise.”

  “Understood.” At that, the smaller Decepticon chose an appropriate mechanism that was part of the police car, transformed, and fused itself with the dash, becoming nothing more than another component of the cruiser. Behind the wheel a human figure began to take shape. The uniform it wore was that of an Oklahoma police officer. The faux cop had a light tan and sported a short, neatly combed, distinctive mustache. Up close, the swath of decorative lip hair looked almost like a miniature antenna …

  Out of ideas, out of breath, and out of patience, an exhausted Sam sat in a chair inside the main Tranquility police station while the duty cop grilled him. The youth was about fed up but too fatigued to do much more than shake his head at the stream of nonsensical questions. His father stood nearby, not happy with the situation but unable to do much about it. Prior to the start of the interrogation Sam had been allowed the traditional one phone call, and it had been to his dad.

  The questions being asked seemed perfectly sensible to the officer who was asking them. It wasn’t the first time he had been required to deal with this kind of teenage weirdness. Experience told him that he already knew the answers.

  “So your car was driving by itself.”

  Who did this guy think he was? a tired Sam mused. Serpico? Or was he acting like this for the benefit of the inevitable concealed camera that was undoubtedly recording the entire interview?

  “Yes—yes. That’s what I said.” Sam’s exhaustion was exceeded only by his exasperation. “Could I be any clearer than how crystal clear I’m being right now? I don’t know how else to say it. The car, it, like—transformed. It stood up.”

  The cop smiled disdainfully. “Wow. Stood up? That’s so—neat. All by itself? No help from a crane? A car that stands up. I gotta get me one of those. Think how useful it would be for police work. You could check out second-story windows without having to get out of your car, lord it over the bad guys, and parking would be a snap. Except you’d have to watch out for all those no loitering signs.” Turning, he opened a drawer, reached inside, and took out a small, widemouthed clear plastic cup. Lines and numbers were inscribed on the side. He tried to hand it to Sam, who drew back in distaste.

  “Fill ’er up, chief,” the cop ordered him. “We’ll see what the lab comes up with. Maybe some better answers than you’re giving me. What’re you rollin’? Goof balls? Wowie sauce? Crystal? Whippets?”

  Tired as he was, Sam had enough energy left to be insulted. “I’m not on anything!”

  “Oh yeah?” The cop was grinning in a way Sam didn’t like. “What’s this, then? Found it in your pocket.”

  Triumphantly, he held up a pill bottle. A bottle half full of prescription pain pills. That they were for someone named Mojo had intrigued the interviewing officer only that much more. He made a show of examining the worn paper label.

  “ ‘Mojo,’ huh? That what you ravers are calling it these days?”

  Aware that he must be sounding a little desperate, Sam tried to explain. “They’re my dog’s painkillers!”

  “Oh yeah, right.” The smirk on the cop’s face grew wider. “I suppose the next thing you’re gonna tell me is that your pusher is a poodle and this interview should be conducted by a K-9 unit.”

  A defeated Sam stared straight ahead. That his line of sight happened to intersect with the holster on the cop’s belt was not lost on his interrogator. The man stiffened slightly.

  “You lookin’ at my piece, Fifty Cent? Wanna reach for it? Think you’re fast? See what happens, c’mon.”

  Aware that he was starting to feel more than a little stoned even in the complete absence of any ingested recreational pharmaceuticals, Sam peered up at the cop.

  “Are you on drugs?”

  Ron had seen and heard about enough. Until now he had stood by quietly, not interfering or protesting, just listening and waiting for the interview to be over. But he did not like the turn the dialogue was taking. Arrest or no arrest, that was his son alone in the chair, and the cop was provoking him. He stepped forward.

  “Look, that’s it. He’s had a hard night. Read out some charges and make a formal arrest. Otherwise I’m taking him home.”

  The cop looked displeased. This wasn’t the way these kinds of interviews worked out on TV. “We’ll run all this through the wire, see what turns up,” he announced threateningly. Then he turned back to Sam. “But before you go, there’s something you need to see.” Smiling tolerantly at the increasingly impatient Ron, the cop picked up a remote and pointed it at the television mounted on the wall opposite.

  Static cleared, and a program began to play. A girl appeared on the screen. She was attractive but austerely dressed. “This is your brain,” she began solemnly as she held out an egg. She cracked it in a pan heating on a stove. “This is your brain on drugs.”

  Trapped and unable to escape, Sam pulled at his lower eyelids. This is your pain on slugs, he recited to himself, fighting to retain his sanity.

  Thankfully, it was the standard unembellished public service announcement and ran only a few minutes. Sam stood morosely nearby while his father signed papers, and then they were allowed to leave. Ron didn’t say anything until they were outside the station and halfway down the front steps.

  “Wanna tell me what really happened?”

  Sam hesitated, then looked up at his dad. “Remember right after we bought the car? When you said you’d pick me up, wherever I was, whatever the situation, no questions asked?”

  Buoyed by his own concern and his son’s exceptional memory, his father had no choice but to concede the point. “That—was the deal, yeah.”

  They continued on in silence, crossing the street and slipping into the family car, Ron behind the wheel, Sam in the passenger seat staring straight ahead. His father turned the key in the ignition.

  “Dad, y’know how Great-Great-Gramps pretty much—flew over the cuckoo’s nest? Think that kind of—difficulty—could’ve been passed down to me? Like—some kind of mutant Witwicky gene?”

  His father smiled as he checked the street for oncoming traffic and pulled smoothly out away from the curb. “I don’t see it, Sam. Besides, my father was perfectly—normal. And so am I.” Reaching over with his right hand, he playfully tousled his son’s hair. “Except on the days when your mother asks me to do certain kinds of work around the house.”

  Sam was not mollified. He did his best to smooth down the hair his father had disturbed. “We learned in biology that certain abnormal genes can skip a generation or two. Maybe that’s happened in my case.”

  “As long as it doesn’t affect your grades or your SAT score,” his father quipped. “Or doing your chores. Too many kids these days seem to have inherited the chore-skipping gene.” A coffee shop loomed ahead, on their side of the street. “How about we get something to eat? I’m willing to bet your abnormal gene doesn’t prohibit the consumption of chocolate shakes.”

  Sam nodded agreeably. He hadn’t thought about it while he had been held at the police station, but he really was famished.

  “Okay.” He managed a tired smile. “Better make mine a double.”

  It was an old village. Once inhabited by the ancestors of Qataris who were now made wealthy by revenues from the sale of oil and natural gas, it had long ago been abandoned to the desert. A community of immigrants, many illegal, had claimed it as their own. The settlement was ignored by the authorities, who had more important security matters to attend to. The newly rich needed protection, and there was always the occasional fanatic who needed locking up.

  The village could boast a well, in a part of the country where there was no need to pipe in expensive desalinated seawater. That precious liquid was reserved for the inhabitants of the gleaming new cities that hugged the white sand beaches of the Gulf. But where the desert gave up water, it would always attract some kind of life.

  The place was not wholly isolated. Probably dating from the 1960s, a single telephone wire still connected the line of poles that marched in sturdy single file across the sand-and-gravel plain. It made an easy trail for the boy and his friends to follow.

  One of the poles abruptly shuddered, even though there was no wind and the ground underfoot was steady. Nearby, an old wood-frame sign trembled and came crashing down. Gun muzzles rose, leveling in its direction. Plainly unsettled, the pair of vultures that had been roosting on the sign rose skyward and headed eastward, inland and away from the still-distant sea.

  Captain Lennox eyed his men: a team of three, and the stragglers they had picked up in the course of their retreat from the devastated base. Had their footsteps been enough to cause the old sign to collapse like that? He was pondering other possibilities when the sand beneath Donnely began to vibrate.

  Something gleaming, metallic, and snake-like slithered out beneath him. Exhibiting reflexes fast enough to bring tears to the eyes of the most demanding drill sergeant, the Irish-American sergeant whipped his gun downward and fired off a concentrated burst. Sand erupted in all directions, and the thing disappeared. Gone? Lennox wondered.

  His question was answered an instant later as Skorponok exploded from the dry ground. Sand flew in all directions as the barbed metal tail curled around the startled Donnely’s lower legs and yanked him off his feet. Flipping the soldier upside down in midair, it grabbed him anew and vanished back beneath the surface. The young sergeant hadn’t had time enough to scream.

  Lennox did. “Move move move!”

  He and the remaining members of the squad broke into a mad sprint toward the village. They gained a moment or two before the metal scorpion shape erupted from the ground behind them a second time.

  Inside the village boundary dogs appeared, barking like mad. Horses and camels reared and bolted in all directions, adding to the confusion. Rounding a mud-brick wall, Lennox howled at his men.

  “You two, cover the road! Epps, take point! Fig, you’re eyes in the back! Everyone, watch the ground! Try to stay off the sand and on the rock!”

  Soldiers took up defensive positions behind the mud walls. Appearing out of nowhere, an older man ran toward them. Probably Yemeni, or maybe Somali, Lennox thought absently as he took the measure of the newcomer. Espying Mahfouz, the man swerved in the youth’s direction. Their attention on other matters, Lennox and his colleagues ignored the reunion of father and son.

  “Where have you been?” the man inquired anxiously in Arabic.

  “At the base. It’s gone, Papa. All gone! Something destroyed it, in spite of the Americans’ weapons. It was killing everybody, blowing everything up. Not terrorists, I think. Something different, like out of Hell.” Turning, he pointed toward where Lennox crouched behind an ancient whitewashed wall. “I didn’t know what to do or where to go. These men saved my life, Papa!”