“Malena? Is that you?”

  She squinted up into the darkness. She was under one of the countless trees, but she couldn’t see anything in the branches. She wasn’t about to pull out her flashlight.

  “Tanner?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper.

  “Yeah, I’m hung up in my chute. I can’t reach my knife to cut myself free. Climb up here and cut me loose.”

  “No time,” she said. “They’ll be here long before I reach you.”

  In her mind, she had a thousand questions. Why hadn’t he answered her transmissions? How the hell had she gotten herself into this mess? What was she going to do when those troops got here and shot Tanner?

  She shook herself, trying to think. Tanner already had a plan.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Take off. I’ll hang out up here. They’ll never see me.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “Maybe. But don’t make it two of us. Now shut up and run. That’s an order.”

  Malena reluctantly slipped away toward the next mass of tall grasses. When she got there, however, she stopped and crouched down. Her heart was pounding, and her pistols were tightly gripped in both hands.

  The 9mm guns felt good, but they were each a little heavier than the weapon she was used to. She’d fired guns like this, but only at practice targets at indoor ranges. A 9mm had quite a kick, and after each shot, it took a fraction of a second for her to get the bead down enough to fire the next round accurately. In her mind, she began practicing that action, even as she hoped it wouldn’t come down to a firefight. After all, the enemy had automatic rifles.

  She breathed deeply and exhaled several times. The flashlights came closer. She could hear splashing and a quiet conversation. She could see now there were two of them. She squinted, but didn’t see the silhouette of a third. One of the men must have been smoking, because she caught the smell of tobacco wafting over the steamy water to her nose.

  Malena waited. When they were about thirty feet away, they were right under Tanner. She tensed, knowing that if they looked up they would see him. She could see loops of Tanner’s parachute lines hanging down, running like spider webs over the tree trunk.

  One of the two shouted and nudged the other. He pointed at the tree trunk and its telltale strands of nylon cord.

  Malena had been tracking them carefully from her hiding place. She knew she couldn’t wait any longer. She fired once, twice, three times with each gun. It was harder than she thought it would be to handle two pistols at once. Each shot rang out less than a second apart.

  At least two of the rounds struck the guy pointing at the tree. He was spun around by the impacts and he crashed down into the mud.

  The second man lifted his weapon and released a burst of fire. Bullets whizzed and clicked as they cut through the grasses.

  Malena was beyond calm shooting now. She lowered the gun in her left hand and emptied ten more rounds from her first gun back at him, spraying the bullets. Fortunately, she knew exactly where he was, while he’d only been firing in the general direction of her muzzle flashes.

  The second soldier sagged down dead, and she crept forward.

  “Stay low,” whispered Tanner from his treetop vantage. “One of them is still squirming.”

  She huddled, aiming and waiting. She didn’t want to fire any more shots unless she absolutely had to. Her ears were still ringing as it was. If she kept firing, any other patrols out here would come running to see what was going on. Every burst of fire would give them more certainty as to her position.

  “I think they’re both dead now,” whispered Tanner. “Take their guns away and come save my sorry ass, will you?”

  Malena’s arms were shaking and she felt weak. What she wanted to do, more than anything, was puke. But there wasn’t anything in her stomach except two energy bars and some water, and there wasn’t any time for throwing up, anyway. She holstered her weapons and did as Tanner had suggested.

  She put a survival knife in her mouth and clamped in with her teeth. Then she climbed the tree as fast as she could.

  When she reached Tanner and began sawing at the tangled lines, they fell away like butter. She marveled at the sharpness of the black blade in her hands.

  After a dozen or so cuts he slipped down with a lurch, then fell into the swamp with a wet slapping sound. He whuffed heavily as he landed.

  “You okay?” she asked, climbing down.

  “No,” he groaned. “But I’ll live. My arms are asleep. I couldn’t hang on after you cut the last line.”

  She came to him and helped him up. She flicked her flashlight on, cupping her hand over the glow. He had plenty of scratches on his face, which was stained with blood and sweat. But he didn’t look too badly banged up. In fact, she found him ruggedly attractive.

  Tanner looked at her seriously. “Psi-agent Marin,” he said, “you disobeyed my direct orders.”

  “So sue me.”

  He chuckled quietly and thanked her. Then he threw an arm over her shoulder. She grunted. He was amazingly heavy, but she strained to keep him on his feet. He hopped until his legs both seemed to operate again and he could walk on his own.

  Together, they vanished into the swamp before anyone else could find them.

  -8-

  By morning, the two of them had discovered several important realities. First, Alpha Team had been wiped out entirely. The wall of force had killed them all. As far as they could tell, they were the only people in Bravo Team left alive. The force wall had served twice as a fly trap, and it had caught a bumper crop of agents.

  Just last night the stealth RH-96 aircraft had headed inland toward the swamp from the sea. Malena had witnessed their fate on the big boards. It was easy enough to imagine what it had looked like from the ground. Black helicopters, silent, swift and deadly, had come in low over the waves from ships at sea. Tanner told her they’d probably been doing about a hundred knots when they slammed into the invisible wall. There was no way for them to avoid it, as they would have been flying in close formation. Even if the last pilot had seen his fellows explode into fireballs of wreckage, they couldn’t have turned around in time. They’d all run right into the wall and died.

  Then it had been Bravo Team’s turn. Taking a different route, they’d dropped from the “high ground” as they liked to call it. XCU maintained a sub-orbital platform in the sky for missions like this. The technology was startling, but it hadn’t saved the second group of agents. Bravo Team’s attempt to land here had ended almost as grimly as Alpha’s.

  “The only reason we’re still alive,” Tanner said, “is due to your fluttery nerves. If you hadn’t freaked out on the way down, we’d all have ejected out of our capsules too low. Like the rest of the team, we’d have been falling too fast when we hit the dome. But because we opened our chutes higher, we survived. We hit the dome with less than killing force, slid down it and fell into the swamp.”

  “Dome?” Malena asked. “How do you know it’s a dome?”

  “I don’t, really. But I sensed a curvature as we followed it around. Did you notice it?”

  Malena thought about it and shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. I could see the Cubans weren’t following me in a straight line. They were curving around a bit.”

  “Right, and since it must be limited by something, some kind of range, it makes sense it must start at a definite point and reach out in a circle in all directions. That means it has a curved top and a circular border at the bottom. Like a giant blister sitting on the surface of the Earth.”

  “How big do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know, maybe two or three miles in diameter. It’s hard to say.”

  “But if it was that big, we should have hit it earlier, right? If it reached up into the sky ten thousand feet or more?”

  Tanner thought about it and shrugged. “Maybe it’s more like a parabolic surface—like a turned-over plate. Not as tall as it is wide.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Malena, thinking he was bullshitting now. Maybe trying to understand what had happened helped him get over the fact so many good people were dead.

  “What matters now is that we’re still alive,” Tanner said. “We’ve got to get a message back to XCU. At this point, they desperately need to know what we know.”

  “Now you’re talking my kind of language,” she said. “You think they’ll try to send in another team?”

  “Maybe. They won’t be doing it the same way, not with two of our groups knocked out. The next team will probably arrive farther away from the target. They may assume we met up with hostile fire. In that case, they’ll drop a combat team down on the beach using a submarine. They’ll plan to come in fighting.”

  “We’ve got to find a radio to inform headquarters,” Malena said. “”And after we report in, we can call for extraction.”

  Tanner blew out a puff of air through his lips. It was a rude noise. “No way. No conventional transmissions. The local hostiles will be on us instantly, even if we do pull it off. We have to find a team com headset. We’ll follow regulations and stay safe.”

  She had her doubts, but she kept quiet for now. Internally, she vowed that if she did get her hands on a radio or even a cell phone, she was calling the home team the second she could.

  Tanner and Malena slipped into the shade of a stand of palms that included a few specimens of cork palms. These trees were considered living fossils, she knew. The genus of cycads was thought to have existed for a hundred million years. They were about thirty feet tall and had dark green fronds that appeared truncated at the tips. Not for the first time, Malena wished she was visiting the Zapata Swamp for a peaceful scientific investigation. This wilderness wetland was fascinating to her even without the addition of strange technological devices.

  At the edge of the palm grove, they found deeper cover. They crouched beside a slow-moving stream surrounded by reeds. There they ate their survival rations and slapped at bugs. The place was absolutely crawling with them. Malena was glad she hadn’t been able to see the things crawling around in the muck when she’d first landed. This region of the swamp was pure by comparison. Really, it was more like a heavily wooded strip of mushy land with more waterways that usual. They’d left the thick bogs behind.

  To the south, she could see stands of palm trees. In that direction, a mile or so downstream, the land came to a warm beach and a warm sea. They couldn’t go that way, however. According to Tanner, the area was inhabited. They’d be immediately reported to the soldiers searching for them.

  “How exactly was this supposed to work out?” she asked Tanner.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s say for the sake of argument we’d reached the center of the area. And that I detected an artifact full of element-X. How were we supposed to haul it out of this swamp?”

  He smiled at her. “I guess I can tell you that. It would depend on the size of the artifact—the tonnage. Probably, the helicopters would come to extract us. But if the X was really big, the helicopters would bring a disk like the one we jumped from.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “You mean…you could just transport all of us and our equipment out of here? Instantly?”

  “Yeah. It’s a form of teleportation, the techs say. It’s limited, of course. You can’t just go anywhere. And there has to be a clear line of sight from between the two spots—no solid obstacles. So we can pop into the sky and back down, but that’s it. The system only works between two of those disks. They wouldn’t want to do it unless they were sure they wouldn’t lose the second disk.”

  “I see. There are two of them, and they are limited in what they can do. I was wondering why we didn’t just pop to the spot where the X was and pop home again.”

  “No, we can’t do that. We can only teleport with a pretty elaborate setup. The Director would never risk even one of the disks without a very good reason.”

  Malena thought about what he was saying. She began to frown as the implications sunk in. “Tanner, I’ve been meaning to ask you some things.”

  He looked worried. “I’m not sure I can give you the answers. In fact, I don’t know that much—”

  “You’re still going to try to bullshit me? Even after I saved your ass and hauled you out of a tree?”

  “Your clearance was officially confirmed by the feds before we left, but it’s low-level and—”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Come on, I’m not a spy for some other government. And besides, I’ve seen enough to know what’s going on—or at least to have a good idea. Let me tell you what I’ve figured out, then you can decide if I deserve to be in on the full story or not.”

  Tanner looked uncomfortable, but he nodded his head.

  “First of all, this amazing technology wasn’t invented here. Cuba has never made any ground-breaking discoveries. This is one of the last places on Earth where I’d expect to find breakthroughs in physics. The dictatorship and embargos have kept them isolated for decades. They’re backwards and cut-off. Not even the Russians love them anymore.”

  Tanner shrugged, but said nothing.

  “It could be,” Malena said, “that some other government is operating out in this swamp. All your cryptic statements have added up to confusion, but clearly there’s something deeper going on. I don’t buy a simple cloak-and-dagger spying effort. This technology is too strange, too varied. I’ve never heard of clothes like this, disks that can teleport people, force fields and what did you call them? Accelerator guns? Is that what you have on your belt?”

  Tanner reached down and touched his sidearm. It wasn’t like any gun Malena had ever seen before. It was pistol-like, but bigger, over a foot long and two inches thick.

  “Pull that out and show me what it does,” she said.

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Who knows? You might need to use it.”

  He drew the weapon and checked a catch on the side, which she assumed was a safety.

  “This is a quite a weapon. More powerful than a handgun. Think of it as a gun that fires bullets very fast. So fast, they reach about a tenth of the speed of light. The bullets break down into a hot plasma at that speed. They turn into a streak of burning gas.”

  Malena reached out a hand, he pulled the gun back a bit. “Listen for a second. This thing is deadly. It will blast a hole in a building. If you aim it at something—anything at all—expect to see a burning hole in it after you fire. It makes quite a weird sound, too. Almost like thunder, because the plasma burns the air as it travels.”

  She withdrew her hand, but continued staring at the gun. “What kind of ammo does it use?”

  “That’s one of the cool parts. It will fire just about anything. Right now, it’s full of plastic pellets about the size of BBs. You can use other stuff, however. Anything that doesn’t gum it up. Sand works pretty well, but not water. It will all dribble out of the magazine or evaporate the first time you fire the weapon.”

  “How does it work?”

  “You cock it by pulling back on this lever, then fire with the trigger under the barrel. That all looks kind of normal, but the light and heat of this thing will surprise you. Don’t put your hands here on the sides, where you see these vents. Flaming exhaust will shoot out at those points. The backfire absorbs most of the recoil so you won’t be knocked on your ass when you fire it.”

  Malena bit her lower lip. “This thing fires plastic pellets? But I’ve read a little about railgun theory, how can magnets propel something that isn’t magnetic? And how can there be so much energy released by such a small device?”

  Tanner shook his head. “I didn’t say it worked on the basis of magnetism. This isn’t one of our designs. This is a captured artifact. As for the power source, I would think that’s obvious. It’s powered by element-X.”

  “Right. Just like all your magical gadgets. But here’s what you aren’t telling me, Tanner, who made these damned things in the first place? Are they Russian? Chinese?”

  He shook his head sadly, marveling at the gun in his hands. “I wish it was someone easy to deal with like that. The truth is we don’t really know who made them. But every once in a while, a new site crops up. Every government on Earth wants this stuff, and we all scramble to go out and get it. We were lucky in this case, as Cuba is right next door. We’ve been able to deploy the first teams at this site.”

  Malena wasn’t sure if his definition of luck held up to her own. But she decided not to remind him what an absolute disaster this mission had been so far.

  “How can you not know who made this?” Malena persisted. “If we’d reached the site, what would we have found? Who would have been there?”

  He shook his head again and stood up. She stood up with him. They looked around cautiously, but didn’t see anyone in the area.

  “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “You have to see it for yourself. There are a lot of different possibilities. Usually, they’re all dead, and that’s a big relief when you see one.”

  “See one what?”

  “An alien,” he said, turning to her and hissing the second word with exasperation. “What do you think we’re talking about here? Haven’t you figured it out yet? What else could have made this stuff?”

  Malena blinked at him, stunned. She’d known that was the answer all along, she realized. It was the only answer that made any sense. But she’d rejected it as too wild, too far-fetched. Maybe, she thought, she hadn’t wanted to accept the implications of what she’d seen.

  One thing was certain to her at this point. She didn’t feel any better now that the truth was out in the open. If anything, she felt worse.

  She stared at the strange gun in Tanner’s hand with a new light in her eyes: the light of fear. She tried to visualize what might have held such a weapon. Looking at it now, it was obvious it hadn’t been designed for a human hand to hold. The grip was too big, too thick. Even a big man like Tanner could barely get his fingers around it. If she had been holding it, she would have had to use a second hand to keep it steady.