Kevin Anderson - Artifact

“I’m glad you came,” Ray said softly, sensing Keene’s pain. He’d never imagined the man could be this bitter. “We’re dwindling in number.”

McKendry shook his head. “Yeah, I keep trying to figure out what’s happening. Arthur last year. Now Simon’s gone. This goes on, there won’t be anyone left.”

“Fine with me,” Keene said.

Ray stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not a bit. I picked up a new perspective on a lot of things in the past year…what’s important, what’s not. And you know what’s last on the list? This idiotic club. How’d I ever get involved with such a bunch of arrested adolescents?” Keene made a disgusted sound. “What could I have been thinking?”

“Let me remind you. You were thinking, Life’s too short to play it safe,” said a new voice.

They all turned. Frikkie stood in the doorway, a shiny titanium briefcase dangling from his good hand.

“Well, well,” Keene muttered. “If it isn’t Mr. Teen America himself.”

Frik either didn’t hear the remark or chose to ignore it. “And you were thinking you didn’t want to miss what could be an historic moment. Truly adefining moment in history. For all we know,A.D. may come to mean ‘anno device’ instead of anno Domini.”

Ray saw Keene set his jaw and knew what he was thinking: no one could mix grandiosity and arrogance like Fredrick Van Alman and, yes, sometimes you wanted to punch out his lights. But Keene only dropped into a chair and swiveled it toward the window; he went back to staring silently at the bedizened desert, effectively removing himself from the room.

“What’s with him?” Frik said.

“Better you don’t ask,” McKendry replied. He fished in his pocket and pulled out a small object. “Here’s our part of the deal,” he told Ray.

He held up the piece as if he were about to toss it across the room, apparently changed his mind, and lowered it. He stepped closer and pressed it into Ray’s hand.

Ray understood. People had shed their blood for this little piece of strangeness. No one should play catch with it. He stared a moment at the object in his palm before he closed his fingers around it. It was larger than Arthur’s. Bluer. With the little figure-eight piece at one end.

Like Arthur’s, the strangely textured surface seemed to suck the warmth and moisture from his skin.

“Where’s Peta?” Frik asked, looking around.

“On her way.” Ray jerked the thumb of his free hand over his shoulder. “Should be landing on the helipad any minute.”And won’t you be surprised to see who’s with her.

“Good. Because we can’t do anything without Arthur’s piece. In the meantime…”

He set his briefcase on the coffee table. Ray noticed for the first time that it was cuffed to his wrist.

Frik unlocked the cuff and the catches. He lifted the lid to reveal a gray, foam-lined interior. Nestled among the egg-crate contours were three oddly shaped objects, similar to the piece in Ray’s hand, yet distinct—distant relatives, but unquestionably members of the same family. A wire-frame stand lay in a rectangular cutout.

“Voilà!” Frik looked around. “Now, where’s this lab you told me you set up to assemble our treasures?”

“Right through that door back there,” Ray said without thinking. He’d been toying with Arthur’s piece on the workbench when the call announcing Keene and McKendry’s arrival had come from downstairs. He’d been trying to run a current through it, but not only was it nonconductive, it absorbed whatever he shot into it without altering its own temperature even a fraction of a degree.

Had he put it away?

“We should wait for Peta,” he said quickly.

“We will,” Frik said. He rose and carried the briefcase like a tray toward the rear of the penthouse’s great room. “We have no choice. But why waste time once she arrives? We can assemble what we have now and be all set to go. When Peta gets here we’ll simply have to plug in the final piece.”

“I don’t know, Frik,” Ray said, trailing after him.

“I do. I’ve waited all year for this moment, and I’m not going to put it off a nanosecond longer than absolutely necessary.”

Ray glanced over his shoulder. McKendry was close behind, but Keene remained slouched in his seat by the window. How was he going to steer this little procession away from the lab—at least until he’d checked it out to make sure that Arthur’s piece wasn’t visible?

He tried to scoot around Frik. “At least wait until I straighten up a little.”

“Nonsense,” Frik said, not even slowing. “We’ve known each other too long to worry about messy desks and overflowing wastebaskets.”

He pulled the door open and stepped through, leaving just enough space for Ray to slip past him.

Ray made it to the workbench first and suppressed a groan—You idiot!—when he spotted Arthur’s piece lying out there dead center for all the world to see. Wouldn’t be the end of the world if Frik spotted it, but he’d promised Arthur and Peta not to assemble the device until they arrived, and he wanted to keep his word.

Pretending to clear a space for the briefcase, he swept a forearm across the scarred surface, effectively moving the piece to the side. Picking it up might be too obvious, so he brushed a sheaf of notes over it.

He turned to see if Frik had spotted it and barely suppressed a sigh of relief. The Afrikaner had stopped inside the door and was gazing at the equipment racked on the walls.

“What do you with all of this stuff?” he said. “Looks like an electronics store.”

McKendry sniffed the air. “A temperature-controlled, electrostaticfiltered electronics store.” He glanced at Ray. “Laminar flow?”

Ray nodded. “Just a hobby. Trying to build a better mousetrap.”

“Forget mousetraps. Before the night is out you’llreally have something to tinker with,” Frik said.

He removed the wire-frame stand from the briefcase, followed by the three pieces, one by one. He handled them gently, as if they were fragile.

Ray knew that if these were related to the piece Arthur had given him, they were anything but fragile. He didn’t know why, but his mouth began to dry as he watched Frik settle the largest of the three pieces into the base of the platform. After he’d snapped another, slightly smaller piece into the first, he held out his hand for Keene and McKendry’s.

“Yours comes next.”

Ray handed it over, reluctantly, but he had to marvel at how perfectly it fit into the other two.

“Which one is Simon’s?” McKendry said. He stood behind Frik, watching over his shoulder. His voice was soft, almost hoarse. “The one he died diving for?”

“This one.” Frik lifted the final, unassembled piece. He rolled it between his thumb and fingers. “Poor Simon. I miss him. He gave his life for this. I propose we name the device after him. The Brousseau Device, so that we never forget him.”

“As if we need that to remember him,” Keene said from the other room.

A grand gesture, Ray thought, but ultimately meaningless. What did Frik care who it was named after, as long as he controlled it?

“What about Paul Trujold? And Arthur?” Ray asked.

Frik glanced up, a sardonic smile twisting his lips. “Paul was my employee. I assume Arthur acquiredhis piece through the mail or via your friend Manny, and he died in a men’s room. I think the device deserves a better pedigree than that.”

He fit Simon’s piece into the assembly, then jerked back his hand.

“What happened?” Ray asked.

“It…” Frik rubbed his fingers. “It felt like a shock, like a—”

“Holy shit!” McKendry rasped.

Ray didn’t have to ask—he knew what the big man was talking about: the incomplete assembly was moving. It spun around so the gap where the last piece would fit faced the pile of papers Ray had just moved. Platform and all, it began sliding, inching its way across the workbench.