Kevin Anderson - Artifact

“What do we do?” Ray said. He felt his gut coiling into a knot. Objects didn’t move on their own, a force pushed or pulled them, energy was expended…unless it was magnetic and being drawn toward a metallic—

Oh, hell! It was butting up against the papers covering Arthur’s piece. Ray reached out to grab it, but Frik stopped him.

“Wait!” He gripped Ray’s wrist with his good hand. “Let’s see where it’s going.”

Ray had a pretty good idea: it was moving toward the rest of itself.

Sure enough, it kept moving, bulldozing the papers aside, until it straddled Arthur’s piece.

“Where didthat come from?” Frik frowned as he pointed. “That’s…that’s…”

“Arthur’s,” Ray said. No use trying to deny it. By process of elimination, Frik certainly knew what it looked like.

“It was supposed to be in New York!”

“Supposedto be. But it’s been here all along.”

“So Peta lied about—”

“No, she really thought it was there. By now she knows otherwise.”

“I don’t understand,” McKendry said.

“It’s a long story,” Ray muttered, thinking that it was one he didn’t want to tell. Not yet. Not until Peta and Arthur arrived.

He didn’t have to worry about stalling. Frik was off and running. He picked up Arthur’s piece and dragged the assembly and its frame back to the center of the workbench. “Right now it’s show time.”

“We should wait for Peta.”

“What for? Peta is coming in empty-handed. As I said before, I’ve waited too long already.”

He grabbed the pair of insulated gloves lying to his right and slipped a glove over his good hand. Before Ray could stop him, he had snapped the fifth and final piece into place.

A flash of brilliant blue-white light lit the room, knocking Frik backward. He would have fallen if McKendry hadn’t been standing there. Ray too was staggered by the brilliance. He blinked furiously, trying to focus through the floating afterimages, but he could make out only shadows. He heard footsteps pounding in from the great room.

“What the hell was that?” Keene’s voice.

“Look who decided to join the party,” McKendry quipped.

“What are you jerks trying to do?” Keene said. “Wreck the thing?”

Finally Ray could see again. He focused on the workbench and saw the device jittering around as if in an earthquake, only the floor was still. And one of the pieces—Simon’s, no Peta’s, he thought—was smoking. The fumes stung Ray’s nostrils.

“Something’s wrong!” Frik yelled.

“How about telling us something we don’t know,” Keene said.

The smoking piece twisted and took off, hurtling across the room to shatter against the far wall.

Frik and McKendry hurried over to check out the fragments. McKendry, who had been closest to them, got there first.

“Nice work, Van Alman,” Keene said, his tone verging on a snarl. “You must’ve put it together wrong.”

“I couldn’t have,” Frik said. “The way they’re shaped, there’s only one way those pieces can interlock. I—”

“Face it, man,” Keene said, keeping up the pressure. “You blew it. Whatever you did triggered an eject button.”

“More like are ject button,” McKendry said, picking up a handful of fragments. “This piece was bogus, guys. The device spat it out.”

“Peta!” Frik said, doing his best to ball his good fist within the heavy glove and pounding it on the table. “Damn her! She gave me a fake! When she gets here—”

“Watch out!” Ray’s gaze had been fixed on the device. “It’s up to something!”

They all watched as the device began to glow and a blue light enveloped it and its stand. The glow brightened and seemed to thicken—not a term Ray would normally apply to light, but the best he could come up with at the moment—and obscure the device within it.

Suddenly a beam of bright blue shot out, thick as a man’s wrist and laser focused. It barely missed Keene’s head as it lanced toward a spot on the wall just to the left of the door. Keene stared at it a moment before stepping through into the great room. “Get in here, guys. You’vegot to see this.”

Ray led the way but stopped dead in the doorway when he saw what Keene was talking about. McKendry plowed into his back, propelling him into the room.

The beam of light had pierced the wall without damaging it—no hole, no burn marks. As far the beam was concerned, the wall didn’t seem to exist. It traveled with undiminished brightness across the great room, through the outer wall, and into the night.

“Look,” McKendry said, pointing. “It’s moving, almost as if it’s tracking something.”

At that moment Ray became aware of a pulsating thrum.

“Do you hear that?” Frik said.

Ray nodded. He knew the sound. “That,” he said, “would be Peta’s helicopter heading this way.”

42

“There it is,” Peta said, pointing through the helicopter’s bubble window.

Arthur grinned. “You’re sure?” He sat to her left at the helm of the sprightly little Chief-8, his right hand firm on the stick. He winked at her. “It’s so hard to tell Ray’s casino from the others.”

The wink said it all. Even among the gallimaufry of brightly lit, high-concept, high-rise casinos lining the Las Vegas Strip, ferro-concrete behemoths in drag watching the endless parade of tourists, Ray’s wedged-shaped Daredevil Casino stood out. Maybe it was its shape, apex aimed like a spearhead at the sidewalk. Or maybe it was the space shuttle that appeared to be launching from the right side. Or perhaps it was the realistic Godzilla-like creature, with animatronic head and arms, bursting through the left wall.

She noticed a crowd beginning to gather around the monster and glanced at her watch; almost half past eleven. Ray’s stuntmen-cum-actors must be about to begin their assault on the giant fire-breathing lizard.

“Anything wrong?” The flight had been glide smooth until a moment ago, when she’d noticed a little pitch and roll.

“Some strange updrafts around the casino.”

The Daredevil’s rooftop helipad loomed before them. Peta dug into her shoulder bag. She found what she was looking for but didn’t remove it. “I want you to see something before we land,” she said. “I didn’t want to be the only one in on the secret.”

“Maybe it should wait till after we land.” Arthur kept his eyes straight ahead.

“I really think you’ll want to see this now.”

She opened her hand and held the piece up where he wouldn’t have to turn his head too far to see it. After a quick first glance he stiffened and took another look.

“What in the world?”

“It’s my piece, the one you gave me.”

“But I thought—”

“I had Ralphie make a phony—and he did a masterful job. That’s what I gave Frik.”

“So he thinks he’s got three but he’s only got two. I love it! Doesn’t Ray know—?”

“Uh-uh. At the time I wasn’t quite sure about Ray. I mean, whether or not he had something to do with your, um, death, or if he and Frikkie were in cahoots. So I didn’t tell him. I’ve learned the truth, but I haven’t exactly had time to call him.”

“So you and I will be the only ones who know.” He grinned. “How do you want to work it? We can let them assemble it with the fake, and when nothing happens, pull out the real things and say, ‘See if this works better.’ Or we can—”

The interior of the cabin filled with a bright blue light. The helicopter dipped. Arthur fought the stick.

“Oh, God!” Peta cried. The light had centered on the piece in her hand, but it was coming from outside. When she looked through the window, she could follow a tightly focused beam straight back to Ray’s penthouse atop the casino. “What are they trying to do to us?”