Resilient - Evolution

Chapter 12: Strange Fields

They waited for the rest of the team to come from Table Rock Lake. Nina had a sneaky suspicion that things weren't on the up-and-up. There wasn't anything concrete that she could put her finger on, but something wasn't right. After dealing with those different groups down south, she sure didn't want to jump right back into another mess.

Roger and Ben weren't ready to have their links turned on just yet. She'd given them a choice, and they wanted to keep their heads as close as possible to the way that they'd been their whole lives. It might slow them down on what they could accomplish, but it was their call.

Duke relayed through Ram that he was almost there. Some kind of interference blocked communication between him and the group waiting under the river. He couldn't talk with them directly, but he could still send a message back.

Nina said, "Ram, how can our signals be blocked? I thought you could communicate even if there was an EMP wave."

"The scans from your drones show that there is a blanket of shielding that doesn't allow our frequencies to make it through," Ram said. "There is no record of anything that could do this. I'll keep looking."

"Well, how come I can still talk to you then?" she asked.

"Different form of signal relay," Ram said. "We're talking through the cargo elevator system. It's a little more direct and has its own shielding."

Eric had been listening to all this and said, "Carlos ... can you detect that weird shielding? Or do you just know about it because of the results we are experiencing?"

"I can't sense it directly, but I can detect it based on the rate of signal return," Carlos said. "Our communication signals are bouncing back at full strength, so I can determine the distance to it. I've already pinged it in every direction. It seems to be about a hundred feet over and below our location and circling around similar to a flat elliptical field that encompasses this area where the ships are and a little bit farther out than that."

Nina looked around, and the drones were all hovering, almost in standby mode. "Carlos, fan out with the posse and ping in every direction. Let's find out everything we can about this thing."

It only took a few moments for the drones to work their magic. "The shielding is complete and holding steady in the dimensions we discussed before. There is another of the same kind of shielding around one of these new ships," Carlos said.

"Send a drone to see if the shielding around us can keep it in," Nina said. "We need to find out if it just stops communication signals, or does it stop everything."

Eric said, "Which ship is shielded?"

"Third one on the left from your position," Carlos said as one of the drones zipped away to probe the shield around them.

"Evidently, there's a lot going on," Ben said. "You guys are making all these weird facial expressions and moving your hands like you're working things out. Want to bring us in on what we're doing?"

"I'm sorry, Ben," Nina said. "We're talking through the links. We've got a shield of some kind around the area where these ships are that our communications can't go through, and there is a shield around one of the ships, too. We're trying to figure out what to do from here."

"Is the ship with the shield generating the other one, or is there something else going on here?" Ben asked.

"Or is the ship trying to lure us into a position where it goes boom, and we all turn into pudding?" Roger said.

"The drone went through the shielding and came back," Carlos said. "It instantly lost communication when it was on the other side, and they resumed when it came back to this side. No other adverse effects are detected."