The Eye of God (Sigma Force 9)

Duncan dug the end of the crowbar into a gap in the door.

“Careful . . .”

Using the steel bar as a fulcrum, he got his feet on the rock to either side of the wreckage—and heaved down. The thermal hatch resisted his efforts for a few seconds, then ripped away, flipping through the water.

It took Duncan a moment to swim into proper position to point his camera into the innards of the crashed satellite.

Again Jada felt a sink of defeat. All the electronics were charred, most of it melted into mounds of plastic, silicon, and fiber optics.

On the screen, Duncan moved one hand over the inside, still careful not to touch anything. His finger pointed at one square object, a block of steel with visible hinges on one side. Protected by the bulk of the craft, it looked relatively intact. From the urgency of Duncan’s motion, it was clear he was trying to communicate.

“That must be where the energy is the strongest,” Monk said, looking over her shoulder and apparently reading her mind.

“Duncan, that’s the gyroscopic housing. If you can, try to keep it intact. It should only have a single fat cable running to it. If you can twist that off, it should lift free as a whole.”

He gave her another thumbs-up and leaned the crowbar against the side of the satellite. He would need both hands free to pull this off.

Again, as his fingers touched the housing, the feed went dead.

Jada shared a look with Monk—then they both stared toward the lake. If Jada’s theories of dark energy were correct, Duncan could be about to wrestle with the very fires that fueled the universe.

Be careful . . .

5:44 P.M.

Running out of air, Duncan fought both the satellite and his own revulsion. Stubborn piece of—

He wasn’t prone to swearing, but between the melted slag that trapped the gyroscopic casing and the repellent touch to its energy field, it felt as if he were trying to unscrew a pickle jar while his fingers squirmed in electrified gel.

As soon as he had popped the hatch in the back of the satellite, the EM field had surged stronger, pushing like steam out of its scorched interior, rising from this steel heart. When he touched the housing, his fingertips felt as if they were pushing through mud. The energy field resisted him, or at least it registered as such to his magnetic sixth sense.

When his fingers finally made contact, it was indescribable. During his training as an electrical engineer, he’d brushed against a live wire or two. But this was no bite of copper. It was more like touching an electric eel. The energy had a distinct living feel to it.

It set his hairs on end.

Finally, with a savage twist of its half-melted cabling, he broke the housing free. He lifted it out, as if removing its power core, and kicked off for the surface, anxious to be rid of it.

Reaching the surface and fresh air, Duncan breathed heavily and kicked for shore. He carried the gyroscopic housing in one large hand, as if palming a basketball, a ball he was more than happy to pass off to a fellow player.

5:47 P.M.

Jada waited for Duncan at the edge of the lake, carrying a blanket in one hand. As he reached the shore, he shoved up, dripping wet, his tattoos bright against his chilled flesh, covering his shoulders and down his arms.

Clicking off his headlamp, he fell into shadows. Focused on the laptop, she hadn’t realized it had already gotten so dark. Night did not waste any time falling at these elevations.

Duncan waded out of the lake. She traded her warm blanket for his steel prize.

“Why is this so important?” he asked, his teeth chattering a bit.

“I’ll show you.”

She moved to her makeshift desk, basically a flat boulder holding her laptop, and placed the housing down.

She explained, “If this is giving off the same electromagnetic signature as the relics, it must be tied to the comet’s corona of dark energy. If I could get this to a lab and properly study it, I might be able to get some real answers.”

She glanced significantly at Monk.

“On it,” he said. “Kat will get us back to the States by the fastest route possible.”

Jada spoke as he raised his satellite phone. “We’re already this far east. It’ll be quicker to reach my labs at the Space and Missile Systems Center in L.A. I’ve got everything I need to do a complete analysis there, plus access to engineers and techs familiar with my research. If there are any solutions to our problems, my best chance to discover them is there.”

Monk frowned, as if disagreeing with her, but that was not the source of his consternation. It was his satellite phone. “Can’t get any signal now . . .”

“Might be the energy given off by this thing,” she realized aloud. She pointed him toward the neighboring rock pile. “Try farther away. I’ll have to figure out a way to insulate this if we’re going to travel by air.”

Duncan crouched next to her, back in his clothes after drying off. “I ran a hand over the remainder of the wreckage after yanking that thing out. I couldn’t feel any trace of the energy left in the satellite. It all seemed to be emanating from that housing.”

“Makes sense.”

“Why?”

“This is the heart of the Eye of God, its very namesake.”

She shifted her attention back to the housing. She searched along its sides until she found a small latch and undid it. With great care, she broke the case open, the two halves hinging apart to reveal what it protected.

Duncan leaned closer.

Seated inside, reflecting the glow from the laptop, was a sphere of quartz about the size of a softball. Though you couldn’t tell from looking at it, the sphere was virtually flawless.

“This is the gyroscope that spun in the heart of the satellite,” she explained. “We used it to measure the curve of space-time around the earth during our experiment.”

“But why is it charged with energy now?”

“I’ll need to do a hundred tests to confirm it, but I have an idea. As it was spinning out there, measuring the curve of space-time, it monitored the wrinkle that formed. I believe the stream of dark energy that created that wrinkle flowed along that crease and poured into the eye of the only observer.”

“The crystal sphere.”

“Turning it into a true Eye of God.”

“But how does that help us?”

“If we could—”

A strange whistling noise drew both their eyes—followed by a thunk of something striking flesh.

Khaidu sank to her knees, her back to the cliff.

Her hands found her belly.

And the steel arrowhead sticking out from there.