Once again, he began to climb. The effort the air force was making spurred him on. If they were trying this hard, risking the use of nuclear weapons, his assessment was that they had drawn the same conclusion he had: This strange machine was damned important, and well worth the effort necessary to destroy it.

He reached Gina. “You climb well.”

“Those are nukes,” she responded. “Captured now.”

He looked toward the bombs, dark spheres about twice the size of basketballs. They were high-blast-effect, low-yield plutonium bombs.

“We need to gain control of them.”

“Can we get to them?”

“I don’t see how.”

Below them, the clouds were becoming more defined, and Mark saw something in them, a fast-moving shape. Then, rising into the clear was an unexpected sight: a press helicopter, its red-and-white livery gleaming in the sun. It was insane, but so heroic and so human.

The snakelike projection slid out, aiming toward the chopper.

Where he and Gina were, the tower of antennae hummed loud and high, a sound he could feel in his chest. The sense of increasing power made him wary.

The chopper got closer. As the purple light played along the rotors, material began flying off them in chunks, then in streams.

“We need to help them,” Gina screamed.

The projection was rigid now, its light flooding the chopper. A door slid open and a man, smoke pouring off his body, could be seen writhing, preparing to jump out.

“Mark, it’s burning them to death, we’ve got to do what we can!”

“Which is nothing!”

As the man became a torch, Gina sweated, her eyes following him as he went sailing downward, arms grabbing air, legs kicking. His smoke trail disappeared into the clouds.

She watched the struggling chopper. The metal snake undulated, painting it with the light, and Mark realized that it wasn’t simply destroying the chopper, it was torturing the inhabitants, purposefully prolonging their agony.

Unwanted images from the Glade swarmed in his mind, and he felt the lust for human suffering returning to his heart. He fought it, though, and he knew how to fight it, by bringing to mind the thought of how the pain must feel to the victims.

Hair and back ablaze, another man dove out of the chopper. Smoke gushed from the doors, both now open.

They were following it down, the snake remaining a few feet from it, and he knew that it was probing individual crewmen, touching its fire to their bodies.

Somebody came out onto one of the runners, a young man in a smoking T-shirt, his hair flying. Bracing himself as best he could, he aimed a video camera at the huge ship above him. As he shot his image, the light from the snake danced on him, and he screamed, his cries small in the vastness of the sky.

Gina’s gaze became even more fixed, her lips hanging open in a parody of sensuality.