Chapter 32

As Bumblebee stood infront of Alexander, his towering form illuminated by the glow of his Autobot emblem shining brightly into the night sky, Alexander couldn't help but feel a surge of awe and wonder wash over him.

"This is pretty amazing to watch," he murmured, his voice barely above a whisper as he gazed up at the spectacle unfolding before him.

The rhythmic pulsing of the light seemed to dance with the stars above, a beacon beckoning their allies Autobots to join them in the battle ahead.

At 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 spiderthing—also a Decepticon.

"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 com-plementary 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 Bay page. Ignoring the accompanying image of the young human, both machines focused their attention on a pair of battered, badly scored spectacles. The extraor-dinarily 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.

But Frenzy soon found out the lens was already sold to another human by the name Alexander Morozova, he searched for the human and only found traces of the human here and there.

Frenzy turned to Barricade and said in Cybertronian,"We have to find this human, keep a lookout for him."

While It was early morning in the Global Response Center of the National Military Command, but a visitor would not have known it from the flurry of activity that had continued through the night and had filled the room since the previous day. Along with the very best techs representing all services, the secretary of defense was there, as were the directors of the NSA and CIA, a number of especially tech-knowledgeable generals and admirals, and a wide assortment of grim-faced support personnel.

Maggie was there, too. At the moment she was just looking on, analyzing people for a change instead of sounds, sights, and algorithms. The admiral who was speaking nearby wore a name tag that identified him as Bingham. It meant nothing to her. Within the circles she moved in she often encountered officers from every branch of the service, but rarely of such exalted rank.

"Air Force One made an emergency landing," the admiral was saying. He looked very unhappy. "Three fatal-ities on board, all support personnel. About the only good thing you could say about the entire incident was that the president remained unaware of any difficulty. He is presently being shifted to a secure location from which he can safely direct ongoing activities." He seemed like a nice enough admiral to Maggie. More importantly, he had the virtue of being right there, right now. She moved closer. "Um, if I could just mention—" Ignoring her, the center's deputy director responded to the admiral's account. "Whoever did this finally managed to infiltrate our defense net—which is the same thing they tried to do in Qatar. Only this time, it worked. They got in before we could intercede." "What'd they get?" The secretary of defense, she thought, was admirably composed under the circumstances.

The deputy director shook his head dolefully. "We still don't know fully, John. We only found out a some classified files one of them was code named "Project Iceman"."

Johnny sighed and muttered,"I have feeling this something to do with Sector Seven."

John knew he had to get Alexander here soon.

"What about the intrusion?" Keller asked him. "The virus—if it is a virus, as we understand it."

The deputy director looked dejected. "We're still trying to break it down. It's a brand-new kind of infiltration. None of our people has ever seen anything like it before. I'm told that it has similarities to a spider-bot, but that both its core and the way it propagates are different. Way different. We're not sure what it's going to do when it fully activates but I'm told that if and when it does, penetration is widespread enough to cripple the entire system."

The secretary of defense coughed softly. "That would put us back to Pony Express days. Can we stop it before it detonates?"

The deputy director took a deep breath. "Every time we try to insert an antidote, an antivirus, it analyzes the threat, mutates a countermeasure—and speeds up. Almost as if it draws strength from every attempt of ours to neutralize it.

It's like it's not a virus anymore—it's become the system. Infiltration has been so thorough that if we find a way to shut down the intrusion, we'll end up shutting down the system ourselves." He spread his hands helplessly. "Same result as if we do nothing. It's not exactly a technical term, but the best word I can find to describe it is fiendish. "

"Well, whatever happens," Keller muttered, "the one thing we're not going to do is 'nothing.' "

Keller looked at Maggie and questioned,"Maggie, you know how advanced this hack was?"

"Yessir." Now surrounded by the three men, she did her best to stand a little taller without making the effort obvious. "I was just trying to point out that whoever we're dealing with hacked the national military firewall in ten seconds. Even a brute-force frontal attack with our best supercomputers would take twenty years to achieve penetration like that."

"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."

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.

But John Keller spoke up,"I believe her."

As John Keller's words hung heavy in the air, Bingham's disbelief was palpable, his expression a portrait of incredulity.

"You can't be serious, Secretary," Bingham protested, his voice tinged with disbelief. "Are you suggesting that we entertain the notion of extraterrestrial involvement?"

John shook his head, his gaze steady and unwavering as he met Bingham's incredulous stare.

"I wish it were a joke," he replied solemnly, his tone carrying the weight of undeniable truth. "But the evidence suggests otherwise. This is beyond human capability. And it seems the President and Sector Seven are already in the know."

Bingham's skepticism faltered in the face of John's unwavering conviction, his mind racing to process the implications of such a revelation.

"I've already put in a request for clearance from the President," John continued, his voice heavy with determination. "We need to be prepared for whatever comes next."

Just then someone came running in,"Mr. Secretary, sir! We're presently tracking a special ops team under fire in Qatar. They say they're survivors of the attack on the base."

Keller frowned. "Forensics says there were no survivors." Soldier and secretary locked eyes. "This sergeant I had on the phone says otherwise—sir."

Keller's expression tightened. "I appreciate your take on the situation, Sergeant, but we still need confirmation before we can act. Reactionary elements in the Qatari government are already threatening to throw us out if there's any more trouble. We can't just go in and shoot up another piece of desert unless we have a damn good unas-sailable reason. What's the nearest in-theater AWACS?" As soon as the Predator reconnaissance drone crested the scrub-spotted hill its camera locked on the images of the firefight directly ahead. Banking sharply to its left, it began to circle the field of battle while keeping as much of it as possible sharply in focus. On board the AWACS plane airborne just off the Qatari coast, the drone's controller adjusted the unmanned aircraft's angle of approach even as he relayed what it and he were seeing back to Washington via the hurriedly launched new communications satellite. In the intelligence center, the staff sergeant who had alerted Keller touched a finger to his earpiece to make sure he was hearing correctly before reporting to the secretary.

"AWACS has visual, sir. Coming online now. I can't vouch for the strength of the signal: it's a new satellite and we haven't had time to test—" An impatient Keller cut him off. "Put it on the monitors. Whatever we've got." The sergeant relayed the order. Oversized screens that had been full of statistics went blank, only to brighten with a flurry of thermal signatures. Most were clearly human. The other was . . .

Bingham "What in God's name is that?" His reaction, if not his exact words, was echoed by everyone exposed to the real-time images that now dominated the room's multiple screens.

Keller stared at the outline of what appeared to be a gigantic yet nonorganic scorpion."So they did come?"