Satyr Play 03 Pt. 01

"Status report, Mick," Crane commanded through his mic. Their radios were shielded, so they still worked.

The sergeant was still a little overwhelmed by the shared emotions, but she pulled it together and answered. "Colonel. The pseudo-clouds appear to be dead. The strike zone of the last prolonged bolt is too energized for us to enter. In the center of this zone is a body. We can't get close enough to make a positive identification or to determine if the person is alive or not. It looks to be a male based on body shape and clothing. The area is sprouting new growth unnaturally fast. Grasses and flowers are actually growing before our eyes. The four Silver People we met in Tennessee were here before we arrived, and they showed us how lightning affects the plant life where it strikes.

"And how exactly did they do that?" Crane asked, weariness in his tone.

Mick felt a little uneasy with what she was about to confess, but she pushed ahead. "Uh, it seems we can speak mind to mind if we hold hands. We can see each other's memories if we share them. Feel each other's emotions, too."

"Crap. The brass is gonna shit bricks. Okay, secure the area. We'll send in troops to take control of the strike zone," the Colonel said.

Sam was on his hands and knees with his face almost to the ground, trying to get a look at the face of the body in the circle, but it was in a fetal position. Yablonski squatted down next to him.

"What are you doing?" the soldier asked.

"I think this might be the fella who asked us to save the people when we first arrived," Sam replied as he rested back on his heels. Looking at the expression of interest on the young soldier's face, Sam reached over and touched his hand. The image of the glowing man suddenly appeared in Yablonski's mind. He yelped and fell back on his ass.

Mick joined them. "What's going on?" she asked crossly.

Sam looked at her. "I just showed him an image of the guy we met when we arrived. He said he was drawing the lightning to himself and needed us to move the people to safety. This has to be him as the lightning sure got him."

"Let me see that meeting, please," Mick asked, holding out her hand.

Sam took her hand and shared the memory with her. When they released, Mick looked closely at the body. "I think you're right. There should be more scorching on his clothes, though."

Orange light suddenly shone up from the ground under the body as a crack formed under it. It widened, and the body slipped through to fall into the upstretched hands of beings made of glass. Sam and Mick stared in shock through the tear in space and saw they were looking down at a red grassy field where three Silver People were smiling up at them and waving. Sam waved back, and the tear snapped closed.

"What were we looking at?" Mick asked.

"No idea. Maybe a better question is, where were we looking?" Sam replied. "I ain't never seen a place where the grass is red like that. Jake, you ever seen that in your nature shows?" He reached out, and they touched hands.

When they let go, Jake pondered for a moment. "There's Japanese blood grass, and some prairie grasses but nothin' quite like that. Such a rich scarlet shade with wide blades. It looked soft as well, the way it was moving in the wind."

Mick looked at Sam, who grinned. "My buddy Jake is a bit of a nature show nerd. Documentaries too."

"If that wasn't Earth, where was it?" Mick asked.

"Your guess is as good as mine. Did you see those Glass People?" Sam asked.

Mick's expression froze as she was aware of the existence of Glass People but wasn't at liberty to talk about that.

Catching her hesitation, Sam nodded to himself. "Ah, I see. Well, that was a first for me, if not you," Sam said gently.

"Did you see them too! So beautiful!" Jeannie gushed. She'd been standing on the other side of the circle when the rip opened, so she had a different perspective.

That gave Sam an idea. "Everyone who was looking through the hole that appeared, please link hands and share the memory of what you saw." He looked at Mick. "This may give us a kind of 3D view."

Almost all of them had watched, so when they linked hands and brought up the memory, it blended together until they could see down into the other place. There'd been a large number of the Glass People standing in the field as well as a few Silver People. Orange sunlight was playing over their glossy surfaces. The angle didn't allow for a horizon view.

"Sam! The shadows!" Jake exclaimed through their link.

Then they all understood as he shared his epiphany. The sunlight was coming from almost directly above. They weren't looking at light made orange by sunset. It was orange at noon, so either something in the atmosphere was tinting the sunlight orange... or the sun shining on that place was orange.

"That's not Earth!" Yablonski exclaimed, his shock reverberating through their connection.

"Next question, why did the glass people take the body?" Mick asked.

"I think he was alive," Brenda said.

She pushed her memory of seeing his hand closing into a fist as he was lifted down through the tear.

"Shit! Could that have been like an involuntary twitch? I mean, he was hit with lightning for a long time!" Jake exclaimed. "How could anyone survive being hit with that much?"

"As the Sergeant said, he shoulda been burnt crispy, but he's not. Let's not pronounce him dead until we know for sure," Sam suggested.

Mick looked around and suddenly noticed everyone and everything around them had slipped into slow motion. She glanced at Sam, who was smiling at her.

"You finally noticed how slow everyone's got?" he asked, and she could only nod. "We noticed that when we speak in our heads like this, our brains get faster, we can talk faster, and the world around us gets much slower. When we have to speak the old way, our brains have to stay slow," Sam explained.

"This could be really useful!" Specialist Green enthused, and the others agreed.

Jake noticed an army truck coming towards them. "Is that truck carrying that machine you used on us back at the shack?"

The soldiers looked where Jake was pointing and saw he was right.

"It looks like a larger transmitter. It's probably a lot stronger," Mick said.

Sam frowned. "I think we'll make tracks. I suggest you do the same." He and his three friends raced away from the group of soldiers before Mick could protest. She picked up her mic and tried to speak into it and felt her perceptions slow right down as everything around her sped up. The truck was getting much closer.

"Colonel? The approaching truck seems to have a larger version of the knock out field projector. Why—"

"G2," was Gordon's only response. It was the code they'd worked out on the flight back to Washington.

Mick signaled her team, and they ran away from the truck at maximum speed. The emitters kicked in, and they wobbled as vertigo destabilized them, but they'd managed to get out in front of the maximum range of the wave, and they pulled away. The sergeant led the way and reduced their speed to eliminate the infrared tracking capabilities of the satellites. They'd go to ground and attempt to contact the Colonel in twenty-four hours.

Mick hoped he'd be okay.

-=-

Colonel Gordon Crane sat in a chair in the same windowless meeting room in the bowels of the Pentagon. Across from him sat Colonel Keith Palmer, the leader of the team who'd tried to capture Crane's team back on the Mall. When he'd been unsuccessful, he arrested Gordon and his driver, Corporal Dulane, and brought them to the Pentagon.

Palmer didn't look happy. Crane was content to wait. He'd read the report his sergeant had texted him before she went into hiding, and he knew he was sitting on a goldmine of information.

Stephen Dawes stepped into the room with a frown on his face. Following him were the two men Crane didn't know the names of. He noted that Palmer immediately looked to the older of the two men. So, Gordon assumed he reported to that man as he reported to Mr. Dawes. The third man aimed a crooked smile at him before taking a chair.

"What the hell is going on here? Why have you arrested Colonel Crane? And who are you?" Dawes asked Palmer.

"I'm Colonel Keith Palmer. I report to General Baines. I was ordered to observe Colonel Crane. When his team was replaced with the silver aliens, he brought them to Washington. When I attempted to secure them, he allowed them to escape. He is jeopardizing the mission."

Gordon watched Palmer and saw an officer dedicated to the preservation of the country he'd vowed to serve. Basically, he saw himself, so he held no ill will against the man. There was just a conflict of orders, and now he had the name for the old man.

Dawes looked at Crane and held his eyes. "Is this true?"

Gordon shook his head. "No, sir. He is incorrect on several points. May I speak freely before Colonel Palmer to explain?" Dawes nodded stiffly. "We attempted to capture the four silver beings using the energy projectors but were unsuccessful. In retaliation, they turned my squad into Silver People. Then they stopped to talk to me and explained why."

"You spoke to them? They speak English?" Dawes asked.

"Yes, sir. They aren't alien. They were human. They've just been altered by artifacts from the pseudo-clouds. They're Sam and Jeannie Lagrange and Jake and Brenda Miller. Two Midwest farmhands and their wives. The two men accidentally became Silver People when they messed around with something they found in a pseudo-cloud that another killed. They, in turn, exposed their wives to the same components, and they've been chasing the clouds ever since."

"So, you're saying they're human under that silver skin?" General Baines asked.

"No. They don't claim to be human, physically, but they do say their minds are still human, and their ideals seem to hold true." He looked to General Baines. "My squad is still my squad. Loyal and duty-bound. We were ordered back to Washington to assist with a potentially catastrophic situation. They knew they would be subjected to the idiocy they encountered after the crisis passed, yet they followed my orders and returned with me. They saved many lives."

"Are you missing the point that they aren't human any longer, and we need to know how they tick and what kind of threat they represent?" Baines snapped.

"I'm well aware of the facts, General. What you aren't aware of are the facts we collected from the initial group of Silver People, the four midwestern Americans. We know how they became Silver People. They told us how it happened. They showed us how we could make more if we choose to. I witnessed it happening to my squad. When I spoke to the soldiers afterward, they indicated that it actually felt good. Another fact my people collected tonight was how the Glass People escaped from the locked gymnasium. It's as we feared. They can open tears in space and step through. My people reported that they were able to see through a large tear and witnessed a large number of Glass People and some Silver People standing in a field of red grass under an orange sun. They're not on Earth."

"What?!?" the General exclaimed.

Crane shrugged. "I might have gotten more information, but Palmer's team decided to make his attempt at capturing my team."

"You informed your team to run. They're now on the loose," Palmer asserted.

"No, they've gone to ground and will contact me tomorrow. They're still my squad. They remain devoted to the mission, as do I," Gordon asserted.

"But they won't come in," Baines growled.

"Yes, they'll come in, but not if they're going to be experimented on. Fully human soldiers would behave the same way under this threat, and there's no need for it. They've already proven they'll tell us everything we need to know." He locked eyes with the General. "Having a squad of bulletproof soldiers able to move faster than we can register with our eyes gives us one hell of an advantage, wouldn't you say? And remember, we know how to make more."

That got through to the man.

"I'd personally like to speak to one of these Silver People," said the man with the crooked smile.

Crane nodded. "We saw a report from Kuwait that Silver People were assisting the Glass People after that massive attack from the pseudo-clouds. It looked like some escaped, and these may be the ones my squad saw through the tear."

Dawes looked uncomfortable. "I got word from Director Hall that the Glass People the armed forces in Kuwait detained have escaped. The soldiers guarding the prisoners were screaming some nonsense about them falling through the floor. Now, that makes sense." He fixed his eyes on Colonel Crane. "We need information on how they're doing that and how we can counter-act it."

"Yes, sir," Gordon responded crisply. "Out of curiosity, have the Glass People demonstrated any offensive abilities, aside from opening rips between worlds?"

That earned him another sharp glance from Dawes. "The building the Kuwait intelligence officers and two CIA observers were working in collapsed. The bodies have yet to be recovered from the rubble. No sign of the ones they were interrogating either. That sounds like they have some offensive abilities to me."

Crane held his tongue, though he could interpret that information another way.

Dawes looked to the General. "Any more secret teams watching our people? Do you have a team watching Colonel Palmer and his team?"

"If I did, you know I couldn't tell you about it," the General snapped.

The ludicrous nature of the situation and the events over the twenty-four hours was suddenly too much for Gordon, and he snorted.

The others in the room all looked to him.

He could have apologized or pretended the sound was just a sneeze, but he was so weary of subterfuge. He looked back at them with a frank stare.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

"Not helpful, Colonel," the Director of Homeland Security said gruffly.

He just nodded to his boss. "Am I under arrest? If not, I'd like to check into a hotel and get some sleep."

"The power grid is still down, so hotels won't be accepting new guests at the moment," the nameless man added.

"You're not under arrest. We have a few rooms on reserve at a nearby hotel. You can stay there. Bring your team in tomorrow to Homeland Security headquarters. I want to speak to these soldiers directly." He caught a raised eyebrow from the third man on the team and nodded to him. "You're invited, as well as the General."

"And Colonel Palmer," General Baines insisted.

"Leave your toys at home," Dawes said, looking to Palmer and received a nod from him once the General nodded as well.

A man in a dark suit entered and walked to the Director's side to whisper to him.

"Shit! Send two more teams to assist in the search," Dawes said to the man, who nodded and rushed away.

"Search?" General Baines asked.

Stephen's expression was grim. "With the chaos the pseudo-clouds caused and the blackout, people have gone missing. Most were running in a panic and got separated from their groups. One of the missing is someone we're trying to recruit. The young man is a genius with computers. He makes our geniuses look like toddlers discovering an Etch-a-Sketch. If his skills got into the wrong hands, there wouldn't be a computer on the Internet that wouldn't be open to them."

The men shared concerned looks, then Dawes looked at Crane hopefully. "Your team can cover way more ground quickly!"

Gordon nodded. "A brilliant idea. Yes, they could, if they hadn't been forced to go into hiding until the morning. If your genius is still missing when they contact me, I can send them a picture and have them check every road, alley, and walkway for him."

Dawes glared at the General, whose expression closed up. He looked back at Gordon. "I'll send you a photo of him. Go get some sleep."

"Thank you, sir," he said. "Where are Corporal Dulane, Private Jackson, Private Blayne, and Corporal Rewan?"

"We only brought in you and Dulane. You can bring him with you to the hotel. There was no sign of the others," Palmer said.

"Fine." As Crane left the room, he caught the nameless man giving him an appraising look. When he held his eyes, the crooked smile reappeared. Gordon looked away, an uneasy feeling in his stomach.

His instincts told him the man was every bit as complicated and mysterious as the Glass People or the Silver People.

That didn't bode well for tomorrow.

-=-

"What do you mean Henry is missing?" Camila's shrill voice came through the earpiece of the phone the Homeland Security agent loaned Mahati. It was going out over satellite as the local cell towers were all down. She watched the teams coordinating their search. There was a little butting of heads between them and the NSA agents.

Mahati's cell had been off and protected inside her shielded purse when the EMP's went off. Her extra caution against data thieves finally paid off as she had a working phone. Of course, without the cell towers functioning, her cell was a costly paperweight.

"I'm calling you with a satellite phone borrowed from the Homeland Security people. Power is still out here, no cell towers, and the dark is making the search more complicated."

"What happened?" Camila asked, conscious of listeners.

"We were doing a little sight-seeing on the Mall, and a weird lightning storm suddenly struck. Henry got us running for shelter in the Lincoln Memorial, then the lightning started, the lights went out, and everyone was running. We got separated. Afterward, I realized he wasn't with me, and I couldn't find him. Teams from the NSA and Homeland Security are looking for him now," Mahati explained, her voice beginning to wobble.

"Mahati, they'll find him. He couldn't have gone far," Camila said to calm her.

"I've never been this far from home, and I thought I was on top of things. The day was going so well. Henry was enjoying the museums and the monuments. We only had one more to see then we'd catch our flight home. Now, this!" She had a lump in her throat, which was hard to talk around.

"You need to be our eyes on the ground for when they find Henry. We know you can do it. Henry believes in you, you know that. I'm watching the news story now, and I see the blackout is extensive. He's probably just lost." Camila said gently, and Mahati felt herself calming. Henry did believe in her. She had to live up to that.

"Yes. Yes, you're right. I'll be here when they find him. I'll get him home," she said, feeling her nerves settling. "Thank you, Camila."

"Thank you, Mahati! Please keep me informed."

"I will. Goodbye."

She wasn't sure why it was so difficult to find one man. Camila was right. He couldn't have gone that far.

Chapter 22

Henry couldn't feel his body.

Rather, he felt all of it, but it just felt like a big ball of cotton.

He couldn't see. He couldn't hear, taste, or smell either.

One thing he could feel was magic. He was overloaded with the stuff. He knew that cotton sensation was every cell in his body vibrating so quickly that if any additional energy was added, it would trigger a cascade explosion tearing him apart, right down to the atomic level. He needed to bleed that energy off.

"Henry? This is Xiong."

He couldn't respond verbally, but he pictured a smile in his mind and received a flash of one in return.

"Thank you for saving our friends."

He envisioned a thumbs up.

"You helped save many people in your capital city. No one in the large park was affected by the lightning," Xiong expressed.

Henry felt him holding something back, so he reached for Xiong mentally.

"No, Henry, don't. You were injured. You must rest and heal... as best you can."

Frustrated by his inability to communicate, he simply pictured an unhappy face.