Angela had first met Eklund while prepping a Science Horizon show on NASA’s late-’90’s faster-smarter-cheaper robotic Mars program. Eccentric, brilliant, a confirmed workaholic, Eklund had quickly become her compass in navigating the labyrinth of Space Agency politics as well as an all-around go-to guy on all things Martian.
“Richard? Angela Browning. Are you guys smoking the drapes over there, or what?” She tried not to giggle, but not hard enough to succeed at it. “I mean the Mars CD.” Angela glanced up at the pyramids on her screen. “The one with Little Egypt on it. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink?”
On the other end, Eklund sounded puzzled, but Angela wasn’t buying.
“Come on, CGI Boy. Confession is good for the soul. I’m not saying it doesn’t look good. It’s too good! What? Nope, no note, nothing.”
She reinspected the envelope to be sure and looked around in vain to see if something had fallen out on the floor.
“No note, no return address, nada. Just a file labeled tolas with a high-res photo of Cydonia, including some pretty kick-ass pyramids . . . yes, T-O-L-A-S.”
She heard the NASA scientist laughing as he explained the acronym. Angela didn’t think it was as funny as all that.
“Oh, Tricks of Light and Shadow. Great . . . so it’s probably some geeksters at MIT or something, firing up a fatty and having too much fun.”
She glared at the pyramids in the beautifully rendered Marscape, no doubt the beneficiary of state-of-the-art computer graphics. Eklund invited her to bring the disk out to Goddard Labs so they could check it out.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Angela glanced at her watch. “If I’m done before midnight. Leave me a pass, anyway, okay? Thanks.”
“Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle.” Angela hung up the phone, studied the Pyramids-on-Mars for a long moment, then shut down her computer. She squeezed her Beanie moose doll and tucked the mystery CD into an overstuffed shoulder bag her chiropractor had warned her about. She then followed the coffee smell to the kitchen.
But the Mars photo still nagged at her.
So, if it’s not from Goddard Space, then who sent it?
Angela thought about people she’d worked with, those who had access to sophisticated computer graphics hardware: cameramen, other producers, political consultants, people at video production houses. Mostly they just edited news stories or created campaign ads. Nothing like this.
No, no, it’s just a sophomore prank.
“Beware of geeks bearing gifts.” In the cramped office kitchen space Angela laughed, pulling together a tray and a pair of mugs. But pouring out two black coffees, she couldn’t help feeling a little creeped out. It was not like she was being stalked, exactly. Or like she was in any personal danger. Still, it was weird.
TOLAS. Tricks of Light and Shadow.
Like it or not, her curious/critical mind, the reporter part of herself, had become fully engaged. And she knew she couldn’t let it go until she had tracked down whatever she could about the who, what, where, when, and why behind this unsolicited disk. Sometimes being the relentless Angela Browning was no picnic.
Oh, God, you’re not really going to drag your tired Vassar-girl ass all the way out to Goddard tonight? You’re insane.
Balancing her tray, Angela slipped back into the editing bay, and set the coffees on the console.
“It’s hot. You ready?”
“God bless you.” Miriam moaned, rolled back from the keyboard, and doctored her cup with pink sweetener. “You got voice-over copy?”
Angela took out her notes. Without looking at the spectacular Antarctic glacier collapsing in freeze-frame on the Avid, she palmed her stopwatch and timed herself as she read.
“ ‘The Greenhouse Paradox: Is Global Warming Triggering a New Ice Age? Sunday, on Science Horizon.’ 9.5 seconds.”
“Triggering?” Miriam said, tasting her coffee.
Manufacturing? Creating? Leading to? Bringing on?
“Give me a minute.”
Angela planted herself back into her high-tech chair. Reworking the copy, she thought about the mystery disk in her bag again and was sorry she’d straightened up her damned mail pile. It was going to be an even longer night than she’d imagined.
5
Auckland, New Zealand
On the LC-130 Hercules from San Pedro, California, through a refuel at Auckland, and then on toward McMurdo Station, Colonel Augie Blake had slept like the dead, his inveterate snoring drowned in the thrum of the great cargo plane’s Pratt & Whitney engines.
Awake now, he remembered to take salt tabs and downed two with some bottled water from his flight bag.
He’d survived a palpable cardiovascular event back in Houston; he knew that. But Augie consciously pushed it aside, relegating the event and what it might mean to the dank mental storm cellar where most of Augie’s personal bad news got stored. Especially things he’d decided he couldn’t do that much about, in this lifetime. Of course, there was nothing he could do about this latest bit of bad news, at least not right now. Nothing except think about it.
And all thinking about it would accomplish would be to set him brooding over things like his father dying of heart disease when he was two years younger than Augie was now. So, he had chosen not to think about it.
His married sister, Emily Blake Warren, a veteran nurse-practitioner in D.C., had made that do-the-math point about their father last year when Augie had confessed to mild, recurring dizzy spells. She had lobbied hard at the time for a cardiologist she knew at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, but Augie balked.
What are they going to do? Fuck with my diet? Tell me to get more exercise and take baby aspirin? Counsel me to retire if I want to live? Tell me “work-related stress” is the bad actor here and stick that crap in my jacket for the next review? Forget that noise, Nurse Warren.
Hell, retirement would probably kill me, he thought, gazing out the big cargo plane’s window. Maybe later he’d let his sister privately arrange an MRI or a full-body CAT scan, or whatever. Then they could see what was what.
Augie looked down into the preternatural dark at the Antarctic Ocean, dotted with bergie bits twenty thousand feet below. Somewhere down there, thanks to accelerating Earth changes, 400 million billion tons of freshwater ice called the Ross Ice Shelf had just warmed up enough to shear off from the continent and fall into the world’s southernmost sea.
What that might portend for ocean currents that drive the increasingly erratic weather systems on the planet was a problem for supercomputers to model.
But within hours of the Ross collapse, satellite photos had picked up something previously hidden under all that ice: an unprecedented scientific discovery now involving the National Science Foundation, U.S. Defense Intelligence, and Special Operations forces.
Code-named “Dunsinane,” it appeared to be the site of a prehistoric, temperate-climate forest, frozen inside a glacier for over ten thousand years.
A full lid was still down, vis-à-vis the media, because the situation on the ground had become fluid, dangerous, and complex, and the U.S. government was still struggling to get a handle on it.
For Augie, though, it was simple: the young men and women he had handpicked for EET, Extreme Environment Training, at the South Pole—his people—had suddenly been put in harm’s way. And he was coming to get them the hell out.
Leaning his chair back as far as it would go, he stretched his legs, feeling fine if a bit tired. And his prescription for that was simple, too: kick back, drink bottled water, and sleep.
He pulled his NASA cap down over his eyes.
6
Goddard Space Flight Lab/Washington, D.C.
Entering Goddard Space Flight’s waxy fluorescent-lit corridors required the usual security passes, though nothing like the fingerprint and retinal-scan lockdown at the CIA sister lab in Langley, Virginia. Langley fulfilled NASA contracts, too. But it operated in a different culture altogether, “haut spy” culture: a civilian/military hybrid long ago transgendered by the
Cold War into something alien, virtually invisible, and much harder to kill.
The Goddard facility, by contrast, was a more freewheeling science-friendly environment and a haven for odd birds like Richard Eklund and his colleagues in the Mars Underground, an eclectic and wildly unofficial confederation of hard-core space fanatics “with a whole lot of fucking élan.”
Frozen in time architecturally, the Goddard campus preserved the clean, modern design aesthetic of the late 1950’s and a relatively businesslike attitude, from nine to five.
After six o’clock, though, once the presence of supervisors and administrators could no longer be keenly felt, the sprawling Space Flight Center transformed itself into a co-ed, quasi-Wozniakian Greek house with the greatest gear on Earth. And for those in the main domain of radically committed spaceheads, Goddard After-Hours was definitely the shit.
“Sincerity begins at sixty hours, commitment at one hundred,” Eklund and his Mars Underground colleague John Fisher liked to say, leading by example. And with its red flag of Mars emblazoned on newsletters, bumper stickers, and buttons, the Underground had “cadres” at every NASA facility from Johnson Space in Texas to Cal-Tech and JPL in California.
Membership was earned by sweat equity, and whatever official government projects consumed them by day, the Mars Underground passionately invested nights and weekends free/gratis in one thing and one thing only: a manned mission to Mars.
Prohibitive space agency cost estimates running to some $100 billion for such a voyage was the principal obstacle; heavy lifting, a two-year journey, and its attendant cost of fuel being the largest expense.
So, each Mars Underground–affiliated scientist or engineer took up the challenge and struggled with his or her piece of the puzzle: plasma/fusion propulsion systems to shorten travel time, solar-powered oxygen-from-water electrolysis, zero-g greenhouses for grow-as-you-go roughage, and dozens more.
Researcher Richard Eklund’s contribution to the effort was something called the Intelligence Hypothesis, and it was a cheap enough project to pursue. All it really required was off-peak time on the Goddard mainframe and unfettered access to NASA and JPL archives. And an open mind.
With war-related projects grabbing the big budget dollars and the great Soviet-American space rivalry long dead, the Underground knew it desperately needed a catalyst, something that might inspire and galvanize public opinion in favor of a return to the glory days of manned exploration of space.
More satellites finding frozen water that hinted at possible bacterial life were not going to cut it. Neither were more fossilized Martian microbes. They needed something that’d seize people’s imagination and never let go, something worth spending tens of billions and risking American lives for.
Something like confirmed evidence of former intelligent life on Mars.
The Intelligence Hypothesis, as a legitimate line of scientific investigation, was, however, frowned on by NASA administrators. They labeled it speculation, and firmly distanced themselves from any such efforts, inside or outside the Space Agency. But from the Viking Mission in the ‘70’s to the more recent Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey satellite data, many honest scientists believed there were too many intriguing enigmas on Mars to be dismissed.
Eklund and his colleague, planetary geologist John Fisher, had collected striking images from regions around the planet showing much more than just the controversial Face on Mars: there were monumental four- and five-sided pyramidal mounds, serpentine tubelike objects, even a field of what appeared to be identical-sized triangular monoliths.
And no credible models of natural forces like wind, water, volcanic, tectonic, or meteoritic action could be combined by NASA computers to account for them.
Yet when confronted with such evidence behind closed doors, Space Agency officials consistently demurred, characterizing the unexplainable anomalies as “tricks of light and shadow,” too open to subjective interpretation to be of any scientific value.
Undaunted, however, Eklund and Fisher persevered, becoming more and more convinced of what they hoped the Intelligence Hypothesis would ultimately prove: that the fabled Red Planet was littered with artifacts, ancient ruins, and the degraded constructs of a once highly evolved civilization.
Which would be every reason on Earth for mankind to have to go see it and confirm it in person, and take the world along for the ride.
“Eat food, drink water.”
Eklund dumped an armful of Goddard snack-room munchies onto the table in their workstation. Fisher didn’t look up.
“In a sec.”
Intent on a strip of Mars Global Surveyor imaging, John was lost in digital minutiae that’d blind a lace-making Belgian nun.
On-screen, a black-and-white MGS frame brought to their attention by Sir Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame appeared to show an astonishing grove of trees over forty feet high and hundreds of meters across. NASA had dismissed it as probably frozen carbon dioxide somehow shaped like trees, perhaps by Mars’s un-Earth-like magnetic field. As a geologist, John Fisher considered that a feeble theory at best and wholly unsatisfactory, but his tweaking of the highly organic-looking shapes still wasn’t gleaning much.
“If we just had altimeter readings over a cycle of seasons . . .”
“It’s on the request list.” Eklund sipped tea and worked on a box of raisins.
“Yeah, right.”
Given the deep, dark circles in permanent residency under Fisher’s eyes, it did not require much to imagine cartoon wisps of smoke curling up from his ears as well. Eklund spoke to the back of his head.
“You’ve got a granola bar, black tea, and a green apple.”
“Almost there.”
Eklund generally refrained from clucking over the younger scientist’s driven demeanor and grunge-garage personal style. Neither one of them really had a life. Eklund, a suspenders man and collector of vintage bow ties, just dressed more neatly and took a little better care of himself.
The intercom erupted with a piercing high-end crackle.
“Dr. Eklund, Ms. Angela Browning to see you.”
“Uh, thanks. Send her on back.” Eklund looked at his partner. “John. This is that thing I told you about.”
“Fine, fine. I’m toast, anyway.”
They could hear Angela’s Niketowns squeaking down the hall toward them.
“One decent break. That’s all I ask.” Fisher hit a key, making the Martian trees disappear, and grabbed up a granola bar.
Eklund opened the door and found Angela already there, looking cheerfully wired and tired.
“What’s up?” She grinned at him, hefting her shoulder bag.
“The gods are laughing.”
“I wondered what that sound was.”
Eklund waved Angela into their boho science confines. “You remember John Fisher?”
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Good . . .” John stood up with his mouth full, managing to appear starstruck, fiercely bright, and pretty much like he’d just vacated a sleeping bag all at the same time. Shaking hands, Angela thought he was actually kind of cute.
“So, whatcha got?” Eklund rolled a desk chair her way.
“You tell me,” Angela said, and produced the unsolicited Mars CD.
7
The lights were still burning in the East Wing of the White House, which was not unusual, the burden of the Office having accelerated exponentially in the nation’s third century, paralleling that of super-industrial human progress.
Typically scheduled until 11:30 P.M., and then up again at 6:30 A.M. and jogging by 7:00, the fit and youthful twenty-first-century President set a killing pace, even for his junior staff. Some kept up and some were mercifully platooned into two eight-hour shifts, the second shift having already said good night.
In the residential living room, furnished largely with family photographs and a few familiar pieces from back home, the new Commander in Chief had stretched himself out on a comfortably beat-up
old eight-foot leather couch and was scowling down at the briefing paper in his left hand.
“Shit,” he said, snapping to the next page.
The Seal of the Office blazed in blue and gold on his loose gray sweatshirt, and a pine-log fire hissed and popped off raucously like a miniature Chinese New Year in the brick fireplace, which had been rebuilt by Teddy Roosevelt.
“One page of hard-core hype and three pages of tortured crapola.”
Reclining in a club chair a few feet away, White House counsel Sanford “Sandy” Sokoff yawned in agreement. He’d already reviewed the brief prepared by Bob Winston, the national security adviser, and found it an information-free exercise in arcane spy argot and self-important, euphemistic bureaucratese.
“Not exactly what you asked for.” Sokoff nodded, recrossing his boots.
Sandy, a legendary campaign manager, arch fixer nonpareil, and self-styled “Texas Jew-boy,” stared into the merry fire. His black Tony Lamas, worn partly to buy an extra inch of height, rested cowboy-style on the brass-handled distressed old chest that did duty as the presidential coffee table.
“What about the bullets on page four?” he said.
The President cursed quietly and read aloud, the bad taste in his mouth becoming progressively more audible.
“ ‘Protecting rapid-response theater communications, cleaning up dangerous space junk, blinding enemy satellites in time of war . . . ‘ “
“Yeah”—Sandy laughed—”that is quite a steaming pile. There’s smarter ways to do all those things without spending a trillion dollars.”
“Not to mention shit-canning international arms agreements. If we still give a shit about stuff like that.”
“There is that.”
“Our friend Bob.” The President leveraged his long body up and consigned the briefing paper to the fire. “Maybe I made a mistake there, Sandy.”
“Then again, ‘if you want a friend in Washington’ . . .” Sokoff thumbed a smudge off his butter-soft boots.
The Orion Protocol Page 4