July 31, 2035
The insistent, low hum of the armored Suburban's drivetrain was a familiar, almost soporific, counterpoint to the vast, indifferent silence of the Utah high desert. Andy Holden stared out through the heavily tinted, ballistic-grade window, his gaze sweeping across the endless expanse of sagebrush and distant, purple-hued mesas, their forms softened by the encroaching dusk of a late June evening. Ten years. An epoch, measured in the currency of scientific revolution and global transformation. The "Holden Gravitics 10th Anniversary Bash," as Evelyn Thorne's insufferably effusive public relations team had christened it, loomed—a gaudy, self-congratulatory spectacle in Salt Lake City designed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his WGN broadcast. He found the entire thing tedious. An unnecessary distraction from the real work, the relentless, unforgiving pursuit of fundamental understanding that still consumed his every waking moment.
"You seem... unusually pensive, Dad," Myles's voice, calm and steady, cut through his thoughts. His son sat opposite him in the spacious, custom-fitted rear cabin of the Suburban, a secure tablet resting on his lap, its screen displaying schematics for the Shackleton Colony's next habitat module deployment. Myles, now a man in his early forties, carried an aura of quiet, confident authority, the hard-won composure of a leader who had navigated the treacherous currents of Project ICARUS from a bold vision to a series of world-altering realities. The years had etched lines of responsibility around his eyes, but they still held that familiar, idealistic spark that Andy, in his more detached moments, recognized as a potent, if sometimes perplexing, force.
"Pensive?" Andy repeated, his voice dry, a hint of his customary analytical detachment in its tone. "I am contemplating the optimal energy cycle for a Gen-6 MGEP emitter utilizing a stabilized Bose-Einstein condensate, Myles. And the inherent inefficiency of expending several hundred kilowatt-hours of conventional hydrocarbon fuel to transport two individuals a mere hundred and fifty miles to attend a... celebratory social function. The irony is... palpable."
Myles allowed himself a small, tolerant smile. "It's a bit more than a 'social function,' Dad. It's a global recognition of everything you've achieved. A celebration of a new age. People need that. They need to see the man behind the revolution."
"They see the results of the physics, Myles," Andy countered. "The man is irrelevant. The equations are what matter." He gestured dismissively towards the tablet in Myles's lap. "The Shackleton Colony's long-term power requirements... are your latest projections for the H-Core hybrid reactor's operational efficiency holding up under simulated lunar dust and thermal cycling conditions? The virtual prototype simulation tests last week showed some concerning resonance dampening at extreme low temperatures."
Myles sighed, a familiar sound of affectionate exasperation. "The H-Core projections are solid, Dad. Shigeo and the CFS team believe they've isolated the thermal dampening issue. It's a materials science challenge for Emilia, as usual. But can we, just for this evening, perhaps focus on something other than graviton field harmonics or reactor core efficiencies? It's supposed to be a celebration, remember? Ten years. Think of how far we've come."
Andy grunted, a noncommittal sound. He had thought of it, of course. In his own way. The MGEP network spreading across the globe like a healing green tide, choking off the planet's addiction to fossil fuels. The PEGASUS Hawk drones revolutionizing logistics, the Wraith series grav-flyers hinting at a future of effortless personal mobility. Project ICARUS, under Myles's capable guidance, pushing humanity's reach towards the Moon, towards Mars, towards the stars themselves. It was... a significant data set. A compelling validation of his life's work. But celebration? That was an an inefficient expenditure of emotional energy.
Their convoy, a discreet but formidable procession, consisted of three identical black, heavily armored 2034 Chevrolet Suburbans. Theirs was the center vehicle. Ahead, a lead Suburban, its windows dark, its occupants a handpicked team of Mitch Raine's most experienced HG corporate security operatives, all ex-Special Forces or federal tactical units. Behind them, a third Suburban, carrying a similar contingent of elite US government Diplomatic Security Service agents, a non-negotiable component of any off-campus movement involving Andrew Holden, the man whose discovery had become the single most valuable, and most jealously guarded, strategic asset on the planet. The route to Salt Lake City, a remote stretch of Utah State Route 36, traversing a desolate basin between two rugged mountain ranges, had been meticulously swept, sanitized, and deemed secure by multiple advance teams. For discretion, for a deliberate projection of normalcy—or as normal as life could be for the man who had rewritten physics—they were traveling in these conventionally powered, albeit heavily fortified, vehicles, rather than one of Leela Tierney's more... conspicuous... PEGASUS prototypes. The irony of this, too, was not lost on Andy.
The sun dipped lower, painting the western sky in bruised hues of purple and orange. The vast, empty landscape took on an ethereal, almost melancholic, beauty. Andy found his gaze drawn to the complex interplay of light and shadow on the distant mesas, his mind, for a rare moment, drifting from the intricacies of graviton field equations to the equally profound, if less quantifiable, mysteries of the natural world.
It happened with a sudden, shocking violence that tore through the twilight calm like a physical blow.
A deafening roar, a concussion wave that slammed into their Suburban, momentarily robbing Andy of breath, flinging him hard against his seat restraints. The vehicle slewed violently, its armored tires screaming on the asphalt. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the unmistakable, sickening crunch of metal, the shriek of tortured steel. His window, designed to withstand .50 caliber rounds, starred, crazed, but held. Ahead, the lead Suburban was a mangled, burning wreck, slewed sideways across the highway, its form silhouetted against a rising plume of oily black smoke and incandescent orange flame. Simultaneously, a second, equally powerful, explosion erupted from behind them, the shockwave brutally kicking their vehicle forward, then sideways, into a sickening, uncontrolled spin.
"Ambush!" The word, raw, guttural, ripped from Myles's throat. He was already fumbling for the secure comm-link, his face a mask of shock and dawning, terrible comprehension.
Andy's mind, trained by decades of intense scientific focus, processed the unfolding chaos with a strange, almost preternatural, clarity. IEDs. Precisely placed. Perfectly timed. Designed to cripple the lead and rear vehicles, to trap them, the primary target, in a pre-prepared kill zone. This was not random terrorism. This was sophisticated. State-level.
The world outside their windows erupted into a maelstrom of lethal, focused violence. Automatic weapons fire, heavy caliber, staccato bursts, ripped through the desert air, punctuated by the deeper, more resonant thumps of what sounded like grenade launchers. Muzzle flashes, brilliant, angry pinpricks in the fading light, flickered from multiple concealed positions along the roadside—from behind rocky outcrops, from within the dense stands of juniper and sagebrush.
Their driver, a veteran HG security operative named Dante "Nic" Nicolson, a former Delta Force NCO whose calm under pressure was recognized by his colleagues, fought for control of the heavily damaged Suburban, its engine screaming, its tires shredded. "Contact front! Contact rear! Multiple hostiles, heavily armed!" Nic's voice, though strained, was still clipped, professional, a testament to years of ingrained training. "Holdens down! Stay down!"
Beside Nic, Bernie Martin, another seasoned HG operative, was already returning fire through his reinforced window port, his modified M4 carbine barking defiance into the teeth of the assault.
Myles, having managed to activate the emergency distress beacon—a multi-spectrum, encrypted signal that would alert every federal, state, and local law enforcement agency within a hundred-mile radius, as well as HG's own formidable rapid response teams at Promontory—was now attempting to reach Mitch Raine directly on his secure sat-phone. "Mitch! This is ICARUS Actual! Convoy Alpha is under heavy attack! Multiple IEDs, sustained automatic weapons fire! Our location is…" He yelled the GPS coordinates, his voice hoarse, strained against the cacophony of the firefight.
Andy, despite Nic's shouted warning, found himself peering through a narrow, relatively undamaged section of his window. He saw them. Dark, indistinct figures, moving with a swift, practiced, almost inhuman, agility through the twilight. They were clad in what appeared to be advanced, matte-black tactical gear, their faces obscured by visored helmets that bore no national insignia, yet their body armor and load-bearing equipment had a distinct, almost familiar, silhouette—reminiscent of the elite special operations units he'd seen in heavily censored intelligence briefings detailing China's rapidly modernizing PLA ground forces. They moved in coordinated fire teams, laying down brutally effective fields of suppressive fire, their weapons—advanced, bullpup-configured assault rifles he didn't immediately recognize but which looked disturbingly similar to next-generation PLA prototypes, some equipped with compact, underslung grenade launchers—spitting flame and tracer rounds that stitched across the battered hulls of the surviving convoy vehicles.
Then, he saw something else. Something that sent a chill deeper than any fear of mere bullets or explosions down his spine. Several of the attacking operatives were wielding devices that hummed with a low, unsettling, sub-audible thrum, their ends glowing with a faint, sickly green light. As these devices were directed towards the Suburbans, Andy saw the internal lights of their own vehicle flicker, dim, then extinguish. The engine, which Nic had been desperately trying to coax back to life, coughed, sputtered, and died. The secure comm-links went silent.
"Gravitic disruption!" Andy hissed, his mind instantly recognizing the tell-tale signature of a localized, focused energy field designed to interfere with, to disable, complex electronic systems. He had theorized about such devices, had even warned the DoD about their potential in the hands of an adversary. The sophistication, the targeted nature of the disruption, bespoke a level of R&D far beyond any non-state actor. The green glow of the disruptors... it was unsettlingly similar to the hue described in classified reports detailing experimental PLA non-kinetic weapons. This was not just a kinetic attack; this was a sophisticated, multi-layered assault, utilizing technologies that were at the very bleeding edge of applied physics, likely reverse-engineered or independently developed from principles they had desperately sought to acquire.
The attackers were closing in, their movements terrifyingly precise, their fire increasingly accurate. Bullets, heavy-caliber armor-piercing rounds, slammed into the Suburban's reinforced bodywork with sickening, bone-jarring impacts, each one a hammer blow against their fragile sanctuary. The ballistic glass, already starred and crazed, began to spiderweb further, threatening to implode.
"They're focusing on us, Dad!" Myles yelled, ducking as a volley of rounds ricocheted off the armored roof above them. "They know which vehicle we're in!"
"Yes," Andy replied, his voice remarkably calm despite the chaos, his mind already analyzing the tactical situation, seeking patterns, vulnerabilities. "We are the high-value target. Their objective is... extraction. Or termination."
The surviving members of their security detail, both from HG and the DSS, were fighting back with a desperate, focused ferocity. Andy could hear the disciplined, controlled bursts of their weapons, the shouted commands, the grunts of pain as rounds found their mark. They were professionals, highly trained, exceptionally brave. But they were outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and facing an enemy equipped with technologies that seemed to negate many of their conventional advantages.
A sudden, brilliant flash erupted near the front of their Suburban, followed by a deafening explosion that lifted the massive vehicle several inches off the ground, then slammed it back down with bone-jarring force. Andy felt himself thrown violently forward, his head cracking against the reinforced bulkhead despite his seatbelt. Stars exploded behind his eyes. A wave of nausea, sharp and acrid, rose in his throat. He tasted blood, coppery and warm.
Through a swimming, distorted haze, he saw Myles slumped against the opposite door, his face pale, a dark stain spreading across his shoulder. "Myles!" Andy croaked, his voice a raw, unfamiliar sound. He reached out, his hand trembling, towards his son.
The world outside was a hellish tableau of smoke, fire, and cordite. The staccato bark of automatic weapons, the deeper crump of grenades, the unsettling, almost silent, hum of the gravitic disruption devices, all merged into a symphony of chaos and destruction. He could hear "Nic" Nicolson, their driver, still alive, still fighting, his voice a hoarse, defiant roar as he emptied another magazine through his shattered window. "Fucking bastards! Come and get some, you cocksuckers!" Then, a sickening thud, a choked cry, and silence from the front of the vehicle.
The attackers were at their doors now, shadowy figures moving through the swirling dust and smoke. Andy saw the glint of a cutting torch, the harsh, blue-white spark as it bit into the Suburban's reinforced doorframe. They were trying to breach the vehicle.
He felt a sudden, primal surge of defiance, the core of his being, the unyielding will that had driven him through decades of solitary research, through ridicule and dismissal, through seemingly insurmountable scientific and political challenges, now rising up in a final, desperate assertion of autonomy. He would not be taken. He would not be... a specimen.
He fumbled for the emergency release on his seatbelt, his fingers clumsy, slick with his own blood. He had to... do something. Protect Myles. Protect his knowledge. His dead man's switch... it was still active, its protocols complex, its triggers multi-layered. But it was designed for a different kind of threat, a slower, more deliberate attempt at coercion or appropriation. This... this was brutal, direct, overwhelming.
Just as the first section of the door began to buckle inwards under the assault of the cutting torch, a new sound, a high-pitched, piercing wail, cut through the cacophony of the firefight. Sirens. Multiple sirens. Growing louder, closer, with astonishing speed.
A chorus of harsh, guttural shouts erupted from outside, in a language Andy didn't immediately recognize, but the sharp, tonal inflections, the clipped cadences, resonated with an unwelcome familiarity—it sounded distinctly like Mandarin, the kind spoken by disciplined military units, not the dialect of a common street thug. The attackers, professionals to the core, clearly understood that their window of opportunity, their carefully calculated operational timeline, was rapidly closing. He heard a series of sharp, metallic clicks—magnetic charges?—then a coordinated volley of covering fire, more intense, more focused, than before.
And then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they were gone.
He saw them, fleetingly, through the swirling smoke, as they executed a swift, professional exfiltration. Several of them, he noted with a cold, clinical detachment despite his injuries, were getting into what appeared to be advanced personal gravitic lifters—allowing seated groups of them to ascend rapidly, vertically, into the darkening sky, their forms quickly disappearing into the gloom, leaving no trace, no trail. The lifters were not PEGASUS designs; they were cruder, bulkier, yet undeniably functional—a stark, terrifying indication of how far Beijing's parallel gravitic programs had advanced, likely accelerated by stolen data and a ruthless, state-driven imperative. The sheer, audacious sophistication of their escape was another chilling data point.
The silence that descended in their wake was almost as shocking as the violence that had preceded it. It was a silence broken only by the crackle of burning wreckage, the groans of the wounded, the distant, rapidly approaching wail of the sirens.
Andy, his pelvic area screaming in pain, his head throbbing, his vision still blurred, managed to unbuckle his seatbelt. He lurched across the confined space towards Myles. His son was conscious, barely, his face contorted in pain, his hand clutched tightly to his bleeding shoulder. "Dad..." Myles whispered, his voice weak, thready. "They... they knew... exactly..."
"Save your strength, Myles," Andy rasped. His own injuries, he realized with a detached sense of self-assessment, were probably significant—broken pelvic bones, a concussion, certainly, perhaps internal bleeding. But Myles... Myles was his priority. His son. The one human connection that still, despite everything, anchored him to this messy, irrational, and now terrifyingly dangerous, world.
Headlights, stark and piercing, cut through the smoke and dust as the first wave of local law enforcement—a pair of battered county sheriff's cruisers, their sirens now dying with a mournful sigh—skidded to a halt at the edge of the devastated convoy site. They were quickly followed by advanced, unmarked federal vehicles, their occupants emerging with a grim, practiced efficiency, fanning out, establishing a secure perimeter, their weapons still drawn, their eyes scanning the surrounding darkness for any lingering threat. These were the advance elements of the DSS and FBI rapid response teams, alerted by Myles's initial distress call, their arrival, given the remote location, astonishingly swift.
The surviving members of Andy's own HG security detail, bloodied but unbowed, some of them clearly wounded, converged on their vehicle, their faces grim, their weapons still at the ready. Mitch Raine, Andy knew, would be moving heaven and earth to get here, his rage at this breach, this catastrophic failure of his protective protocols, undoubtedly volcanic.
Heavy, hydraulic prying tools—the "jaws of life"—were brought forward. Paramedics, their faces illuminated by the harsh glare of portable floodlights, worked with a desperate urgency, their movements precise, professional, under the tense, armed watch of the federal agents who now formed a tight, impenetrable cordon around the Holdens' battered Suburban.
The twisted, reinforced door finally groaned, buckled, and was torn free. Cool night air, thick with the stench of burnt fuel, cordite, and blood, flooded the confined space. Andy blinked against the sudden glare of a paramedic's headlamp. Strong hands were gently, expertly, assessing him, checking his vitals, applying pressure to a bleeding gash on his forehead.
"Dr. Holden? Can you hear me, sir?" a calm, authoritative voice asked. "We're here to help. Just try to stay still."
As his vision slowly faded, he saw Myles being carefully, urgently, extricated from the wreckage, his son's face pale, his eyes closed, a team of paramedics working furiously to stabilize him, to staunch the bleeding from his shoulder. The sight sent a fresh wave of cold, unfamiliar fear through Andy, as darkness came.
With an almost brutal urgency, they were loaded onto heavily reinforced, medevac-configured gurneys and rushed towards a pair of waiting heavily armored, military-grade medical transport vehicles.
The doors slammed shut. The sirens, a piercing, relentless scream, tore through the night as the armored medevac vehicles, escorted by a phalanx of federal tactical units, their lights flashing, their weapons clearly visible, lurched into motion, accelerating rapidly away from the smoldering remnants of the ambushed convoy, racing towards the nearest military medical facility hidden somewhere within the vast, anonymous expanse of the Utah desert.
End of Book 1