Exiles Read online

  She didn’t know how long she’d been dragged and prodded, but she heard the sound of the waves on the beach grow loud enough she knew they had to be almost upon it.

  Just before the explosion that lit up the world outside her bag hood and the concussion wave that flattened her, deafened her, and threw her into a complete state of shock.

  The man hauled her to her feet.

  Madelyn could dimly see him through the fabric covering her head because he was lit up now by the fiery explosion—wearing the camo-fatigues of a soldier.

  What the hell?

  Was this their answer to her request for a rescue for her sister?

  Stupid, incompetent fucks!

  That thought had barely formed in her mind when she felt like she was on fire herself. She glanced down instinctively and then up when she realized that she seemed to be in the middle of a spotlight.

  It hit her just before she blacked out that it wasn’t a spotlight. It was the transporter beam ….

  She regained awareness to the tune of a meaty thud followed by a meaty thud against metal and a jerk that toppled her to her knees. The bag was abruptly yanked from her head. Her bonds were ripped away hard enough to leave friction burns where they’d been removed and she blinked—Claire’s angel, she didn’t doubt—into focus.

  “Do not move!” he growled as he turned away and strode back across the room.

  Madelyn gaped at him, and then down at the soldier lying unconscious at her feet.

  His body began to glow before her eyes.

  Just about the time she felt the stinging again.

  “Fu ….”

  “ck!”

  It was the most disorienting thing Madelyn had ever experienced. In the space of seconds she’d gone from hooded captive on the ground to an alien ship and then … here, wherever ‘here’ was—a dark, windowless room that reminded her of a jail cell even though it was way bigger.

  Twisting her head around on her neck, she stared around at the furnishings of the room she’d found herself in, trying to decide what sort of place it looked like.

  It didn’t look like the alien ship she’d been in just a few seconds ago, that was for certain. But it also didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to a human sort of abode. Furniture being functional and made for similar beings, everything in the small … apartment? … was recognizable—bed, tables, chairs. But it all bore a sort of institutional plainness that nevertheless didn’t look like any institution she’d ever been in.

  The sense of being in some sort of prison was hard to shake. She wasn’t sure of why she felt that way, what it was about the place that convinced her mind that that was what it was, but the feeling became more pronounced and more of a certainty the longer she examined her surroundings.

  She was wondering if she’d simply been beamed to a different part of the alien ship when she felt and heard an explosion powerful enough to send vibrations through the air around her and up through the floor beneath her feet.

  Earthquake, might have been her first thought since the most recent traumatic event prior to being captured was the earthquake and tsunami that had shaken the dig site in Kuwait where she’d been working, revealing a huge, ancient city. But the explosion she’d felt and heard just before she was beamed up into the ship overshadowed that event.

  That had been an explosion—as in with manmade explosives!

  This place—whatever it was—was under attack! And she was pretty sure it was the same group of bastards that had attacked her camp!

  She thought she must be close to her camp, which brought the realization that Claire’s alien angel, Dante, must have transported her to wherever Claire was.

  Except Claire wasn’t here.

  Did that mean they’d already captured Claire and were now blowing up the place to cover their tracks like they’d done when they’d captured her and her people?

  That thought sent a wave of cold through her and shot her heart rate up to a crazy gallop.

  “Oh holy shit! Fuck!” After a quick scan of the area, she located the door and charged toward it. Fortunately, it opened, but Maddie was too distressed to feel more than a flicker of relief as she leapt through the opening and into a long—a very, very long corridor. It went through her mind that she might encounter the same damned soldiers, or worse—the explosives they’d planted—but by far the thought that dominated her mind was the possibility that she was going to get blown to smithereens if she stayed where she was.

  Or drowned when the sea swept in.

  And where was Claire?

  Dante could not know what was going on. She was sure of that—or trying hard to convince herself at any rate. He must have thought he was transporting her to be with Claire.

  Shaking those thoughts off as she exited the apartment, Maddie looked both ways along the corridor, feeling a sense of doom settle over her as she took in the vastness of the place she found herself in.

  She was never going to find her way out of this damned maze!

  “Claire!” she screamed, choosing a direction and starting to run.

  * * * *

  If Claire had moved any faster, she would’ve been inside the hanger when the bulkhead blew. As it was, she’d already lifted her hand to open the door. Fortunately, the inner hull held but it did buckle. It did make an ungodly screeching noise. The concussion of the blast was still sufficient to knock her to the floor.

  By the time she’d managed to gain her feet again, she saw men swarming the hanger and something far more strange! The hole they’d blasted in the side of the fortress was closing—healing itself—and the water appeared to be receding! That peculiar circumstance so thoroughly captured her attention that the soldiers were upon her before she even realized the threat.

  They reached the door where she stood and began to alternately pound on it and then pry at it while she stared at them in dawning horror. Abruptly one pulled a packet of C-4 from a duffle he was carrying and stuck it to the other side of the door.

  Claire gaped at him for a split second and then whirled and ran as fast as she could. She wasn’t able to make it far enough down the corridor to reach the turn before the blast and the resulting concussion knocked her flat.

  She didn’t manage to get to her feet unaided that time. As she struggled to get up, both of her arms were grabbed near the elbow and she was hoisted upright.

  “U.S. Marines, ma’am. Who else is here?”

  Claire whipped a look toward the man who’d spoken, gaping at him blankly for a moment before she could gather her wits.

  He shook her. “Who else is here?” he bellowed.

  “No… nobody!”

  He didn’t actually call her a liar but his expression did. He turned, jerking her around as he did so and shoving her at another soldier. “Take her to the ship. The rest of you, fan out, keep a sharp look out for insurgents.”

  “What?” Claire demanded.

  The man she’d been handed off to gave her a jerk to get her going and marched her back through the now open door to the hanger.

  She saw she hadn’t been mistaken about the water. It was barely ankle deep when she and the soldier ‘escorting’ her stepped inside the hanger area. By the time they’d waded across to the spot where the men had left their underwater scooters the water was barely deep enough to splatter as they walked.

  “What’s going on?” Claire demanded when she finally regained enough of her equilibrium to begin to assimilate that this sure as shit wasn’t like any sort of ‘rescue’ she’d ever heard of!

  Not that she’d needed to be rescued!

  “You’ll have to ask the CO that, ma’am. I’m just a grunt.”

  “Am I being … arrested?” she exclaimed indignantly. “Because I haven’t done a damned thing! And I demand to know what the hell is going on here!”

  Instead of responding, the soldier grabbed underwater gear and started suiting her up. That threw her into another tailspin of confusion, sent her fear soaring upwards, as
well. Between the barked instructions and his pulling and pushing at her as he fitted her with oxygen tanks and a mask and breather hose, she didn’t get the chance to ask anything else.

  Not that he seemed the least bit forthcoming!

  She didn’t believe for a second that he had no clue of what was going on!

  She was being treated like a criminal, however, and that realization so unnerved her that she lost any ability to think straight.

  It flickered through her mind that it might be in her best interests to escape, but, even assuming she could, where to go? They’d breached the fortress. There wasn’t any place inside that would be safe. And they had to be at least a couple of miles from the coast.

  Besides, directly behind the survival inspired mental prompt a vision filled her mind of the scenario playing out with her being filled full of holes by the man who was currently holding her in his custody.

  The trip from the underwater fortress to the surface where a monster ship waited was nightmarish in itself for someone completely unaccustomed to underwater diving gear. She felt as if she was on the verge of mindless panic all the way up—one breath away from it!

  She was so weary with effort and felt so heavy after the buoyancy of the water, that she didn’t really have the strength to put up any sort of resistance once she was hauled aboard and she was marched down into the bowels of the ship so quickly, shoved into a tiny cell, and locked in that she barely had time to mouth a handful of disjointed questions—all of which went unanswered.

  She stared at the door blankly when she heard the lock click into place, too stunned to comprehend what had happened. Finally, she turned her head to survey the cell she’d been thrown in. There was a narrow bunk along one wall and after a moment, she moved to it and collapsed on the lumpy-hard mattress.

  At least the smell of detergent assailed her when she landed rather than the stench of unclean body!

  There was a silver lining!

  After a few moments, she scooted toward the wall and curled into a tight ball, locking her arms around her bent legs.

  Where was Dante? And why hadn’t he rescued her?

  Or at least tried?

  Chapter Two

  Madelyn had had time to recover sufficiently from shock to perform some mental calculations and sort the puzzle of what had happened and was happening a little by the time she was hauled aboard the ship.

  They hadn’t blown up the camp! The crazy bastards had blown up the dig!

  She thought she would throw up when that thought occurred to her.

  But she had to know if she was crazy or they were!

  She demanded answers and cursed her captors all the way out of the fortress when they refused to answer—well until they covered her face with a breathing mask—and then resumed the tirade when she was hauled aboard the ship and the face mask removed.

  No one answered the questions she screamed at them, but they didn’t have to.

  She knew what they’d done and it threw her into such a sick, helpless, frustrated rage that she couldn’t do anything but scream profanity and threats at them between bouts of calling them every kind of stupid she could think of.

  She was in such a rage she was weeping when they finally shoved her into a cell hard enough she flew across the room and sprawled out. They’d slammed the door and locked it before she could scramble to her feet.

  “Maddie? Oh my god, Maddie! What happened?”

  Madelyn whipped around at the sound of her voice and stared at her sister uncomprehendingly for several moments and finally rushed her, throwing her arms around her and sobbing loudly. “They blew it up! They blew it up!”

  Trying to calm her sister, Claire managed to peel Maddie loose long enough to lead her to the cot and settled beside her, pulling Maddie into her arms again.

  “It’s going to be ok, Maddie,” she said soothingly.

  “No, it isn’t! It’s never going to be ok again! They destroyed it, Claire! Those stupid, retarded, idiots destroyed it!”

  Claire’s heart skipped several beats. “What,” she asked, hoping she’d misunderstood or just heard her sister wrong? “I’m pretty sure they destroyed the fortress ….”

  Maddie snorted. Pulling away, she mopped at her eyes with the sleeve of her night shirt and, after glancing around for something else to use, shrugged and wiped her nose, too. “Ha! They tried! The fucking morons! But it just fixed itself right back. Must have been nanos—or something like that technology anyway. They had to give up on it—this is supposed to be some kind of secret mission and they don’t want to hang around and explain things to the middle easterners hereabout—which they might have to do if they keep blowing things up!”

  She started sobbing again loudly and dropped her face to her knees. Claire rubbed her shaking shoulders soothingly, but she couldn’t think of any soothing words to try.

  It seemed Madelyn was saying they had blown up the city—the ancient city Madelyn had discovered, but why in the hell would they do something that insane? Destroy something of so much value?

  “You’re sure? You couldn’t be mistaken?”

  Maddie sniffed. “They had a fucking bag over my head—but, yeah, I’m pretty fucking sure they didn’t use explosives to blow up the freaking tents!”

  “Bag?” Claire gasped faintly. “What the hell?”

  Maddie sniffed again. “That’s what I thought, but that bastard that was trying to break my arm shoved a gag in my mouth so I couldn’t ask.” She stopped, staring broodingly at the floor for a moment and then uttered an unpleasant chuckle. “Your boyfriend cold-cocked him!” she said, uttering a snorting laugh. “Wonder where he ended up? Not that I care! Dante could have beamed the sonofabitch to hell for all I care!”

  Claire reddened, but rather than debate Dante’s status in her life, she focused on trying to figure out how Dante had managed that when Maddie hadn’t even mentioned him being anywhere around before that. “I’m so very lost.”

  Madelyn dragged in a shuddering breath, mopped her eyes and nose again and struggled to compose herself. “I was dead to the world when the bastards jumped me. I don’t have a fucking clue of what was going through their minds! I thought, at first, that it was like—mistaken identity or something. They had a target close to where we were and jumped us instead.

  “Well, actually, my first thought was that we’d been attacked by terrorists, but I heard them talking and realized pretty quickly that it was American soldiers.

  “But even though that sonofabitch put a bag over my head, I could hear what was going on and there were men everywhere, collecting everything. So I’ve finally realized we were the target. There was nothing accidental about it. I know that now. It wasn’t a mistake.”

  Claire gaped at her. “But … why?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out. Something we discovered—the map room—and maybe that machine. We sent photos. They must have been intercepted. Or that bastard I thought was a friend of Robert’s went straight to higher authority and they arranged it. Clearly it wasn’t just pictures made up from the imagination of the ancients that built the place—or it looked convincing enough to some people that it seemed really important to get their hands on it.”

  “Oh my god!” Claire exclaimed in dismay. She stilled for several moments, absorbing that information, turning it over and over in her mind until at least some of the pieces seemed to fall into place. Then she frowned. “But … how would they know about the fortress under the sea? We didn’t even know it was there ourselves when we sent the pictures to Dad and the others.”

  Madelyn’s face reddened. “I guess that was my fault. I was trying to get help after the damned alien made off with you! I went to the Embassy, but they treated me like I was a nut case and dismissed me. Bastards! At least, I thought that was what they’d done.”

  Claire digested that, struggling with a mixture of guilt and resentment and appreciation that Madelyn had risked so much to try to rescue her—even though she really hadn
’t needed rescuing.

  But, of course, Maddie hadn’t known that!

  And she felt horrible that she was the cause of all of this mess!

  “I’m so sorry, Maddie! If you hadn’t gone to them to try to get help for me ….”

  Madelyn glanced at her quickly, seemed to consider it, and then dismissed it with a shake of her head. “Even if that was why all this happened, I wouldn’t regret it, but I don’t know that it did. We don’t know what triggered it, really. And even if it did, that’s no fucking excuse for what they did!

  “No, the only way that had anything to do with either of us was that we alerted them and we were standing in the bastards’ way!”

  Claire still felt guilty as hell! If Maddie hadn’t tried to get help …. But then again, they might have alerted the bastards to the treasure the minute they sent the photos. Robert was working on something top secret. They probably monitored all of his calls, personal or otherwise!

  She pointed that out.

  Madelyn shrugged. “Supposedly not, but you’re right. That was probably enough. That’s probably why they ignored me at the Embassy, now that you mention it. It actually makes way more sense. They would have had time to plan this assault if that’s when they were alerted.”

  “So maybe they didn’t blow up the city?” Claire pointed out excitedly.

  Maddie felt a surge of hopefulness that quickly died. “They weren’t there because it was a priceless piece of human history! They were there because of the maps! They came to steal that machine we found and the maps and then they destroyed what they left behind to keep anybody else from getting anything. No, that actually insures they didn’t leave anything behind.”

  Claire felt like throwing up. “How could they do that? Destroy something so priceless! Something so important to the history of mankind!”

  Maddie frowned thoughtfully, trying to ignore the sick rage that still simmered inside of her any time she allowed herself to think of what had been lost—forever—because of the greedy bastards! “Maybe it had nothing to do with humans at all,” she said tiredly. “We’ll never know now.”