Chapter 51

?le de l’Est, Seychelles Island Chain, Indian Ocean

Kurt, Kai, and several of her people hauled backpacks full of equipment and explosives through a tunnel they knew well. They’d used it before.

“This is where we took the boat,” Kai explained. “The Gray Witch told us to bring it here and leave it.”

“Did she tell you who it was for?”

“For escape,” Kai said. “For some of the brothers. We do as she asks.”

Kurt knew she was referencing Five and the rest of his group. He got the sense Kai had expected them to come to her side of the island. But if Priya could feel what Kai felt, she would have known there wasn’t enough food for any more refugees. He wondered if that had prompted her change in tactics. Or if she’d been monitoring NUMA and knew Kurt and Joe were scheduled to be on the Reunion expedition and decided that was her last, best chance to summon help.

It was all speculation, just some thoughts to pass the time. To know the truth, he’d have to get Priya back, which was exactly what he planned to do.

After talking it through with Joe, they’d come up with a plan that required them to divide and conquer. Kurt would go after Vaughn, and try to bring Priya home with him, while Joe would lead the rest of the escaped clones overland in a diversionary attack.

Splitting up was less than ideal, but it was necessary. For Kurt to have any chance of navigating Vaughn’s compound, he needed someone who knew that side of the island. If he wanted to stay off TAU’s radar, he needed someone Priya could see and feel, someone she cared for whom she would hide. There was never any question who that person would have to be.

Kai had eagerly accepted the chance. “I’ve seen her only once,” she’d said of Priya. “I would like to see her again with my own eyes. And I have unfinished business with Vaughn.”

“One thing at a time,” Kurt had insisted. “We might need Vaughn alive if we want to end this madness.”

The only negative to Kai joining Kurt was that it left her people leaderless. Joe filled that void easily. To a man, the escaped clones seemed to gravitate to him, just as Five had done in India. He was easygoing, personable, and spoke to everyone as if they were lifelong friends.

Joe gave them the best chance to be effective. He knew enough about drones and cameras and military tactics to plan their attack. He also knew how to properly use the explosives and timing detonators they’d found. The way Joe saw it, they’d have to make a lot of noise to draw the Overseer and his people out. Stacks of high explosives would do the job.

Kurt, Kai, and her people continued through the cave, picking up the sound of waves and the scent of the sea. “It’s not far now,” Kai insisted.

The tunnel dropped in sections, and they were soon wading in ankle-deep water, looking out through an opening at the blinding light of the sea and sky.

“This is far enough,” Kurt said.

The stacks of gear were placed on a flat section of rock that jutted into the channel: wetsuits, fins, masks and mini-cylinders of air, which Kurt had charged and vented and recharged in the mining cave before they’d left.

Kurt and Kai donned the gear, strapping the stainless steel tanks to their chests and keeping the backpacks full of explosives where they were on the rock.

Practice runs in the main cavern had gone well. Kai hadn’t exhibited the slightest amount of panic or claustrophobia. Even acting calmly as Kurt shut off her air and showed her how to buddy breathe off his cylinder. But nothing compared to the real thing. At least they would be making the swim in daylight conditions. Panic tended to grip novice divers at night much more fiercely than in the day.

Regulators were checked. Straps were adjusted and tightened. Masks were rubbed down with saliva, and they waded to the edge of the tunnel.

Years of waves had eroded the concrete where it met the water, but that provided an easy entry into the sea. They braced themselves against an incoming swell, held steady as it swirled up around them, and then rode the wave back out, clearing the rocks and turning toward the bay.

Swimming side by side, they dove to a depth of twenty feet. Deep enough to avoid any real chance of detection, but shallow enough that they wouldn’t need to worry about a decompression stop when it was time to surface.

Following the shoreline in a clockwise direction, they had help from the current for most of the journey. Along the way Kurt continuously checked on Kai. Her kicks started off powerfully, as she seemed determined to get to their destination, then eased as Kurt deliberately reduced the pace.

He’d been slightly concerned that she might get claustrophobic in the mask or panic and hyperventilate while trying to draw too much air, but if she had any of those discomforts, she held them in check. In this way she was a lot like Priya, whom Kurt had never heard complain even once, not from pain, discomfort, or the extreme change in the circumstances in life. The woman he had known had a gentle personality and an iron willpower. The willpower part seemed to have transferred to Kai in full.

Entering the bay, they dove a little deeper, as the calmer waters were quite clear and easy to see through. Using a little dead reckoning and straining to see ahead of him, Kurt spotted alternating light and dark zones. This he believed was caused by the floating arrays of solar panels. He tapped Kai on the shoulder and pointed to one.

They swam into the shadow of the first artificial island. Aside from the warmth of the water, it reminded him of swimming under an ice shelf.

Thousands of pontoons linked together created the base of the structure. The solar panels themselves were raised up above the pontoons, forming a ceiling of sorts. Thick, shielded cables ran along beneath the array, linking together and dropping down into the sand along a central shaft that held the array in place. Kurt remembered the satellite view. Each island took up roughly twenty acres. The shade underneath was deep enough to be gloomy. But Kurt spotted something hidden in that shade that he hadn’t expected.

He tapped Kai once more and pointed upward. They surfaced between a pair of the pontoons, breaking out into the still-humid air beneath the structure. Masks were pulled up. Kurt noticed a half liter of seawater pouring out of Kai’s mask as she raised it.

“You can clear that like I showed you.”

“It didn’t bother me,” she said. “I used to swim in the sea with my eyes open, before the patrol boats started coming.”

He noticed she was shaking a bit. “Stay here and rest for a minute,” he said. “I need to look at something.”

Kai nodded and held tight to the pontoon. Kurt pulled his mask on and went back down, kicking slowly toward a large structure he saw hidden in the shadows. The closer he got, the stranger it looked. He could only describe it as a churning mass, glowing dimly from within. As if a vortex of dark energy had opened beneath the solar array.

Slowing his approach, he stretched out a hand, which bumped against a clear plastic panel. On the other side of the panel—trapped within a circular chamber that resembled the largest of aquarium holding tanks—he found a swirling mass of fish. They were tiny, no more than a couple inches in size. They seemed countless in number. Circling incessantly, but constrained by the curving wall of plastic panels.

At some unheard signal, they stopped in unison and then darted back in the other direction. In that brief second without movement he saw them more clearly: silvery fish, scaled and sleek. They had strange insect-like heads and long fins that could have been wings.

Flying things. Sea locusts.

Looking beneath the swirling mass of fish, he studied the soft glow coming from the seabed inside the tank. It looked as if a layer of faintly illuminated gel had been spread across the sand at the bottom of the tank, but based on what Paul and Gamay had found, Kurt assumed the gelatinous mass was the conglomeration of a million tiny eggs.

This was where Vaughn was breeding his swarms. Hidden from view beneath his islands of solar power.

Kurt swam toward the top of the tank and discovered it to be lidded with the same clear plastic panels. At least this brood is currently contained.

Looking down at them from above was a dizzying experience. Like staring at a giant spinning wheel perhaps a hundred feet in diameter. Kurt could do it for only a few seconds before his inner ear began to protest.

Looking away he saw a television-sized panel with two rubberized antennae sticking down into the tank, a green light on the nearest antenna and a red light on the one farther away. As he focused on the panels to steady his equilibrium, the colors switched.

Down in the tank, the sea locusts came to a stop and reversed direction. Despite his dwindling supply of oxygen, Kurt held his position, waiting until the lights swapped colors once again.

Interesting.

There wasn’t anything Kurt could do with this information at the moment, but he stored it away. With the air in his mini-cylinder becoming rather stale, Kurt left the tank and returned to where Kai was resting.

He emerged slowly so he wouldn’t startle her, but found her breathing hard and seeming agitated just the same.

“They’re here,” she said, sounding alarmed. “They’re here.”

She’d obviously received a message from Priya. “Who’s here?” Kurt asked.

“Your friends,” she said. “The tall man. The woman with long red hair. Vaughn has them. He’s trying to meld them with the machine.”