“Mine too,” she said, her eyes tracing over to Anna, who was busy running her robotic hand along a seat on the other side of the bridge. “What about her?”
Rajesh moved in. “I’m very sorry to admit, Dr. Greer, but I was eavesdropping on your conversation.”
“Well, do you think it’s possible then?” Jack asked.
“An alien language holds a nearly infinite range of possibility. When the Allies were decoding German messages in World War II, for example, they were doing so with a working knowledge of the German alphabet.”
Gabby nodded. “Yes, this would be closer to deciphering Aztec hieroglyphics.”
“To a degree,” Rajesh said. “But even then, much of language is about context. We search for repeating patterns in the text. Patterns describing elements of a shared experience. For example, tree, river, bird, food, war. Of course, these are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what two earthly cultures might share. But go ahead and remove those common experiences and all at once you find yourself lacking a common framework, or even a starting point.”
“So it’s doable,” Jack said, brushing aside the difficulty of the task.
Rajesh wiggled his head, an enigmatic Indian way of saying yes, no and maybe all at the same time.
“Good.” Jack left and went over to Anna.
As he approached, the robot’s face brightened and her lips moved. Jack held up two fingers. A second later, there she was on channel two. Smart bugger, he thought. “Dr. Greer, I have been analyzing the seats on the bridge and they are most enlightening.”
“Oh, really? How so?”
She dipped the pads of her fingers into a groove along the seat back. “If you look closely, you will see a rather specific indentation.”
Jack moved closer and reached in with his gloved hands. Anna was right. There was a series of raised lines and deep depressions. Looking closely, you could just make out the distinct shape of what might have fit inside the space, much the same way that one might guess the dimensions of a human foot by studying a shoe.
The indentation resembled a pair of wings.
A call from Lieutenant Olsen sounded over all available channels. “Admiral Stark wants you all back on the Orb ASAP.”
“What’s the problem?” Jack asked, no doubt expressing a concern shared among all of them.
“He’s mighty pissed,” Olsen explained, not mincing his words. “Apparently, one of you leaked to the media and he’s threatening to pull the plug.”
Chapter 25
Mia and Ollie climbed a narrow stairway that led to Armoni’s flat. At the top and to the left stood a blue metal door. A jailer’s slit snapped open, revealing a pair of eyes that glared down at them. They banked to the right, as if to make sure no one else had snuck in behind them. The slit slammed shut. A large bolt turned and the door swung open. Inside was a space far nicer than Mia had expected—by no means opulent, or even luxurious, but it appeared to have four solid walls and a roof that didn’t leak. Energy-saving bulbs hung from the ceilings, casting a hazy mist about the corridor. A figure wearing black jeans and a hoodie stomped down the hall before disappearing around a corner.
“Leave the money in the wooden box on the wall and close the door behind you.”
Ollie and Mia exchanged a look and did as they were told. The box was just large enough for a stack of bills two inches deep.
Tentatively, they made their way down the corridor and into an open kitchen and living room.
A young woman was by the fridge pulling out a bottle of cacao-flavored Soylent meal replacement. She tossed one to Mia and one to Ollie. Both of them studied the label.
“It tastes like pancake batter,” she said, “but you get used to it.”
“We’re here to see Armoni,” Ollie said, his impatience bleeding through. “Where is he?”
The girl stopped in mid-sip. “Depends. What do you need him for?”
“We have an encrypted USB we need him to crack,” Mia said. “And maybe more. Is he here or not?”
The girl finished her drink and raised her hands, palms flat and angled inward—a sign even Mia understood to mean, You’re looking at him.
“I thought you said Armoni was a guy?” Mia asked Ollie.
“We’ve only ever communicated online,” Ollie explained, just as surprised.
“Uh-huh, the famous Nat Geo interview,” she said, staring at him accusingly.
He shrugged. “What can I tell you? We had budgetary constraints. Email is free. Plane tickets are not.”
Armoni watched the back-and-forth with something resembling amusement. She was five feet, maybe a touch more, with short stringy hair that was angled in every direction at once. Her facial features were strangely androgynous. Perhaps in darker light she might have passed for a guy somewhere in his twenties, an illusion that was dispelled by the unmistakable bumps beneath her hoodie and her wide female hips.
“You’re less endowed than you looked at the front door,” Armoni observed, eyeing Mia’s cleavage.
Her cheeks flushed. “They say the camera adds ten pounds.”
Armoni let out a genuine laugh, her hand covering her mouth, the first girly thing she’d done so far. “So where’s this unbreakable USB key?”
Mia fished in her backpack. “Unbreakable for us at least.” She looked at it for a moment and hesitated before tossing it over.
Armoni led them into a darkened room lit by the glow of half a dozen computer monitors. Pushed up against the walls was a disparate array of office furniture: a stainless-steel filing cabinet, a coffee maker, and a rack of servers, each connected by a length of black wires that snaked up to the walls and along the ceiling like water pipes on a submarine. In the center of her little Batcave were two semi-circular desks dotted with monitors. Each was set end to end, creating a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree hacking interface. Just the thought of climbing inside gave Mia a migraine.
Since she had guests, Armoni cracked open her circular workspace and settled into a plush leather chair. She inserted the USB and then proceeded to crack her knuckles. “A little ritual,” she told them. Straight away, the window popped up asking for a name and password. Armoni ignored that and clicked on a program called Pass-Sniffer. A progress bar appeared as the program went to work. Within no time it had climbed from thirty percent to ninety and then to an error.
Armoni sat up in her seat. Clearly the USB wasn’t nearly the pushover she had expected. Seemed things were about to get interesting. “Looks like we got a FIPS 140-2 on our hands.”
Mia and Ollie looked at one another, equally lost.
“It’s an encryption protocol. A real pain. Usually reserved for government stuff.” She drew in an excited breath and tried another program called FIPS-MD. “Don’t you just love the smell of smoking CPUs in the morning?” she said, presumably loading up an array of movie quotes. The progress bar on FIPS-MD started at one percent and stayed there for several minutes. Armoni drummed the fingers of her left hand on the desk, her gleeful features bathed with harsh light from the monitors before her.
She then clicked a program called Dragon Slayer.
“What will that one do?” Mia asked, feeling she was slowly getting the hang of this.
Armoni chuckled. “It’s an MMO.” Then, after Mia wasn’t getting it, she explained, “Massively Multiplayer Online.”
Mia turned to Ollie for guidance.
“I think it’s a video game,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Anyway, this is gonna take a while. Feel free to grab a seat somewhere and make yourselves comfortable.” That subtle hint at an accent returned with the word ‘comfortable,’ making it come out sounding like ‘come four table.’
“I think I’ll go freshen up,” Mia said, painfully aware of the heat emanating from her armpits.
Chapter 26
Mia returned a few minutes later to find Ollie in the living room, leaning back on a dingy-looking futon. He stared at a muted television on the f
ar wall, his expression blank.
A shout from Armoni’s hacker den startled them. She was asking for someone to buff her.
“Back in my day,” Ollie said, taking a sip from a warm bottle of Soylent, “a nerd was a wanker with thick glasses and jacked-up pants.”
Mia chuckled. “How things have changed.” And almost on cue, a shout erupted from the other room.
“Heal the tank, dammit!”
“I have no clue what’s going on in there,” Mia continued, the remnants of a grin still on her face. “I just hope this won’t take much longer.”
“Why the rush? I mean, it’s probably still not safe to head home.”
“I have a daughter,” Mia explained, her tone growing sullen. “I need to make sure she’s okay.” Her eyes traced down to the phone in her pocket.
“Don’t,” he warned, putting his hand on hers. “When Armoni’s done killing goblins, I’m sure she’ll be able to route an untraceable call for you via the internet. Tell me about your husband,” Ollie said, his eyes unwavering.
She looked away and shook her head. “No husband. Not anymore.”
“He cheated on you, the bastard.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
Ollie’s eyes grew wide before settling back to their normal size. “You were the unfaithful one?”
That faraway look again. “Like I said… What about you?” she asked, trying desperately to change the subject.
“If you’re asking if I’m married…”
“No.” She cut him off. “I can’t imagine any woman who would wait at home while you go galloping around the world.”
“For your information, I do far more trotting than galloping. But you may very well be right. I’ve had more short-term relationships than I can remember. At some point, it always seemed like someone would pull a switch and everything would fall apart.” He looked down at his hands, as though he could see sand pouring between his fingers.
“And when you arrive back home between gigs? Is that when they’re usually gone?”
He looked up at her. “I suppose I won’t be winning Husband of the Year anytime soon.”
She shook her head. “I’d say it’s more of an occupational hazard.”
“Doesn’t help when the occupant is damaged goods.”
She let out a laugh that didn’t have an ounce of humor in it. “Aren’t we all? Life starts beating the crap out of us from the moment the doctor slaps us on the ass and rarely takes a day off.” She studied the lines on his face. “Did you serve in the military? Is that what did it?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My first assignment for National Geographic, I was sent to Afghanistan and embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Summer of 2008. They were a platoon, no more than fifty soldiers, many of them kids, who were struggling to establish a remote outpost in the Waygal District.
“The first sign things weren’t okay? The chopper I flew in on took sporadic fire the whole way there. Then I arrived and saw that the outpost was positioned at the bottom of a deep valley. A first lieutenant, young man by the name of Bows, let me know in no uncertain terms he’d been expecting reinforcements and resupply, not a damn photojournalist. These guys were low on water and equipment, left to fill sandbags by hand.
“Sure didn’t help that the local Afghans were acting strange. Men of fighting age sat around watching the preparations intently. Some were even observed counting off paces around the perimeter. Go shoot ’em, right?” Ollie laughed. “I asked the same thing. But Lieutenant Bows made it clear relations with the locals were already frayed.
“On my end, I kept snapping pictures and asking questions until Bows grabbed a rifle and pushed it into my chest. Said if I wasn’t prepared to pitch in if and when the shit hit the fan, he could arrange my immediate transport out. He was challenging me, throwing down a gauntlet, so I did what anyone would do.”
Mia frowned. “You accepted.”
“Damn right I accepted. But it wasn’t just my ego talking. I figured it might help ingratiate me and break down the wall they’d put up to keep me out. Bows showed me the ins and outs of an M4, how to reload, clear a jam. All the while, I got to keep asking my questions and snapping some great shots.
“Then two nights later, the Taliban swept down from the mountains.” Ollie’s hands surfed along an imaginary current of air. “Must have been hundreds of them, pouring out of the hills like a spring thaw. Bullets buzzing all around us. That was when the incoming artillery started. Mortars shook the ground. Rocket-propelled grenades sizzling past your nose before crashing into half-filled Hesco barriers.
“If there is such a thing as hell on earth, let me tell you, that was it. The air was thick with bullets and the screams of the wounded on both sides. Lieutenant Bows and I were on a small mound of earth with six other men, pinned down by fire from every direction. The soldiers had erected razor wire around our position, but the Taliban came right up, unloading their weapons. I can still see their faces, that look of hatred and determination.” Ollie was staring off into the distance, as though he were watching a movie play out inside his head. “It was soon after that Bows was shot and killed. That’s when I swapped the camera for the rifle. I felt like General Custer at Little Bighorn. A head wrapped in a dark cloth appeared in the window of a nearby hut and I riddled it with bullets. Then ten feet away another fighter charged the razor wire with a hand grenade.” Ollie’s right hand rose into the air. “I shot him too, but not before he tossed it inside our perimeter. Time slowed to a crawl. I remember looking back in panic, trying to see where it had landed. I’d watched enough movies to know if you were quick you could toss them back. What I didn’t know was that this particular Taliban fighter had let the grenade cook off for a couple of seconds before he threw it. I just remember an ear-shattering boom before I blacked out.” Ollie grew quiet, the fingers of his right hand shaking. Mia took his quivering hand and cupped it in her own. He remained silent for another few minutes before he said, “So when you ask if I’ve ever served, the answer is no, but I guess like everything else in life, the truth is never so clear-cut.”
Ollie went on to tell her he still had pieces of shrapnel lodged in his body. These were the scars Mia had caught glimpses of. She was still comforting him when her eyes happened upon the television. A small picture next to the newscaster’s head looked like the radar image of an object underground. Then it cut to footage of a strange metallic structure from an underwater ROV. Although it was in Spanish, Mia could still make out the headline.
Scientists discover proof of alien life beneath the waves.
The remote was on the coffee table, nestled amongst discarded bottles of Soylent and empty pizza boxes. Mia grabbed it and flipped though the channels, searching for one of the twenty-four-hour cable news networks in English.
When she finally found one, they were showing the same images. A moment later, they cut to an anchor seated against a backdrop of the White House.
“There is still no confirmation of the discovery’s precise location, but sources close to the story tell us the US military is currently involved with investigating as well as examining the object. If you’re just joining us, the information coming in is sketchy at best, although initial reports suggest a massive unidentified object has been found deep underwater. We’ve reached out to each branch of the military and have yet to hear back. All of this is in the midst of perhaps the greatest international incident the United States has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the country to the brink of war some fifty years ago.”
The cable news show’s next guest was an eccentric white-haired theoretical physicist named Kenichi Sato, who came on to explain the Kardashev scale. Proposed by Soviet astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, the scale was intended to classify alien civilizations according to their level of energy utilization. A Type One civilization was so-called because of its ability to harness all of the energ
y that fell on the planet from its parent star. In our case, humans currently consumed less than twenty terawatts of power, one-one thousandth of the energy that reached our planet. And yet the sun’s total output was much greater, closer to four hundred billion terawatts.
A Type Two civilization, Sato went on, was able to gather the entire radiation output from its parent star by using a Dyson Sphere, a massive theoretical enclosure built around the sun and designed to absorb every last drop of energy.
Third on the Kardashev scale was a Type Three civilization, one which could control and consume the energy of an entire galaxy.
According to this hypothetical template, humanity ranked somewhere shy of a Type One. But Sato refused to speculate how advanced a civilization might need to be in order to reach our solar system and build the kind of structure discovered underwater. “We could be talking about hundreds of years more advanced than us, maybe even thousands.”
Still reeling, Mia’s mind turned to the package Alan had sent her and his claim of having found some kind of message hidden in the Salzburg chromosome’s DNA. She wondered whether those two things could somehow be related.
Just then Armoni popped out of her gloomy computer cave. The smile on her face faded. “Did a war break out?”
“Not yet,” Ollie said, ominously.
“Then you’ll be happy to hear my guild cleared Ashglenn dungeon.”
Mia did not look impressed.
Armoni turned to head back to her computers and stopped. “Oh, and I cracked your USB.”
Chapter 27
Stark glowered down from the monitor that hung in the Orb’s mess. “Which one of you did it?” he barked, his accusation hanging in the air like a heavy mist.
None of them said a word. Most had already removed and hung up their biosuits, except for Dag, who’d opted to lose the helmet, but keep the glasses and the fitted polymer body stocking.
The group glanced from one to another, their expressions ranging from guilt to utter bewilderment. Jack knew he was innocent, although he was just as certain he was at the top of Admiral Stark’s suspect list. And why wouldn’t he be? Jack had threatened to notify the media to prevent Stark from kicking them off their own scientific expedition. It was a game of high-stakes poker and Jack had thrown in with nothing but a three and an eight, which was to say he’d been bluffing his ass off. Of course he’d never sent Gord a backup of the USO data. Even if he had, Gord would not have had the foggiest idea what to do with it.
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