He pulled away. “Not nearly enough.”
“You’re not gonna do us any good losing your mind over one arrogant Navy officer.”
“It’s just…” His voice trailed off. “We’re here trying to find answers to legitimate questions and I just know all they care about is scavenging as much technology as they can find in the hopes of fashioning some sort of weapon.”
“And what’s so wrong with that?” Her answer surprised him. She wasn’t trying to be provocative. Gabby meant it. “Weren’t you the one who raised the possibility that these things might’ve come here to create a colony, maybe populate the earth with insect people just like them?”
“It was only an idea,” he countered. “We were spitballing, you know how those things go.”
“But what if you were right?”
Her words hung in the air.
“You’ve been against this from the very beginning,” Jack said, recalling their first argument back on the rig. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for self-defense, but not when it becomes a pretext for an arms race. Look what’s happening up there. The world’s practically tearing itself apart and why? Because on one side you have a dispute over land and on the other a global population that thinks just like you do. For all we know, the only reason the world isn’t populated by insect people is because they got an inkling about how screwed up this world was gonna be and said thanks, but no thanks.”
Dag laughed out loud, struck by the imagery.
“I wish I was kidding,” Jack said, trying to keep his blood pressure down. His eyes found the tube at the far end with the artificial womb. He stomped over to it and tapped on the glass. The thing inside had grown to the size of a rat, which was not too far off how it looked. Although furless, the creature had an elongated body, four short limbs and the narrow face of a shrew.
Jack pointed. “Is this how they intended to rule the planet, an army of hairless mice?” His eyes remained locked on the creature, his words echoing in his mind.
“Dr. Greer.” A male voice with an accent broke in.
He spun around to find Rajesh. “What is it?”
“I need to speak with you about that thing.” His eyes shifted from left to right.
“Oh, yes, of course. You pick the channel, I’ll follow.”
Rajesh held both hands in front of his chest, just out of sight from the others. A four and a five.
•••
“I realize that the moment isn’t ideal,” Rajesh began, “but I managed to trace part of the code used to infect Anna’s systems.”
“Let me guess, Naval Intelligence.”
“That’s what I thought at first too, but that was not the case. It is far worse, I’m afraid.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“The core section of code is extremely common and often used in corporate espionage. Then I did a little more digging on the dark web.”
“From the Orb?”
“Internet access is mostly the same no matter where you use it. Even where locks and barriers are present, they can be circumnavigated if one knows how. The nitty-gritty aspects aside, I was able to trace the rest of the Trojan’s design to a group called Sentinel.”
“Sentinel? Never heard of them.”
“Not many have. They are a pervasive organization intent on preventing man’s outreach toward possible extraterrestrial civilizations.”
“So you’re saying they aren’t the biggest fans of what we’re doing here.”
Rajesh smiled, his head doing that little dance again. “You may be off by a factor of a million, Dr. Greer. It’s beyond not liking the idea. They consider it the greatest existential threat the human race will ever face.”
“More than superbugs and nuclear war?”
“Humankind will always find a way to claw its way out of the ash pile and rebuild. But not if a far superior race sterilizes the planet.”
“That hardly makes any sense.”
Rajesh touched Jack’s shoulder. “It may not make sense to us. I am merely telling you what they believe.”
“Yes, of course.” Jack ran his fingers together. “You think they’re somehow in cahoots with the ONI team?”
“That’s not possible. Sentinel is mostly made up of powerful civilians. Besides, what the Naval Intelligence men are here for is perfectly obvious.”
“Yeah, they want as much alien tech as they can find.”
Rajesh shook his head. “You mean tech that will require decades, maybe lifetimes to fully understand? Don’t get me wrong, they’ll collect it. But that isn’t the real prize they’re after.”
Jack considered the bodies down in the autopsy room. Then the creature growing in the incubation chamber behind them. “I give up. What are they here for?”
“Anna.”
Chapter 49
Walking through the streets of Kathmandu was like stepping through a portal and into a fairytale. Rows of pagoda-style buildings lined rust-colored roads. Strolling in their shadow were crowds of Buddhist monks in maroon robes, tourists wearing Tilley hats, and Hindu holy men, covered in ash and chanting their devotion.
Fleets of buses and white taxi cabs jostled for dominance over motorbikes piled with people. The conflict continued in the air as clouds of incense and turmeric battled waves of pollution and human sewage. It was a world of contradictions, at once both divine and detestable.
Mia, Tom and Sven sped past a woman washing clothing at a water spigot in the street. She glanced up at them, indifferent. From here they spotted the majestic corners of Kopan Monastery projecting up from a nearby collection of trees. There they hoped to find Dr. Lars Van der Berg as well as answers to a growing number of questions. But like any mission of discovery, for every question answered, five more rose up to take its place.
Mia had spent at least part of the thirteen-hour flight from Europe to Nepal reading and absorbing Dr. Van der Berg’s final research paper. Or at least the parts she could make sense of. Much like Alan, Lars had also become convinced the human genome was hiding secrets it was reluctant to reveal. But his reasoning had less to do with Salzburg syndrome and whatever unusual DNA it contained than it had to do with mathematics.
As he put it, the DNA of all living things contained “an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language”—essentially, a non-random structure which bore all the hallmarks of being designed. He drew on Rumer’s transformation as one of many examples. In 1966, Rumer found that the genetic code could be divided neatly in half, between whole-family and split-family codons. Codons were a sequence of three DNA or RNA nucleotides that corresponded with a specific amino acid. The chance of this occurring naturally was astronomically low.
For his part, Lars used Rumer’s transformation to describe twenty-eight ‘swappable’ codons with a combined atomic mass of one thousand, six hundred and sixty-five and a combined side chain atomic mass of seven hundred and three. Both of these numbers were divisible by a prime number.
In all, Dr. Van der Berg listed nine elegant examples within the human genome where the mass of the molecular core shared by all twenty amino acids or other groupings was divisible by a prime number. The problem? Lars never indicated what that prime number was. Perhaps he didn’t know.
The vast majority of Lars’ paper gave her a headache, but through the pain, Mia was beginning to see that maybe their initial attempts decrypting the DNA in Salzburg had been rather crude and lacking.
The three of them were passing an open-air café when Sven took Mia’s arm and pulled her to a stop. He grumbled, motioning over the television that was hanging on the wall inside.
“Alien threat to exterminate mankind uncovered in our DNA,” read the headline. Groups of monks, locals and foreigners alike shuffled before screens all along the avenue. People looked at one another in disbelief. Similar scenes of shock were playing out around the world. Shortly, the president of the United States was set to make his third address in so many days. Pundits in the m
edia were referring to the discovery as an impending genocide of the human race and it was having a predictable effect.
Sales of weapons in countries that would allow them had already begun to soar. So too had reports of families plucking their kids out of schools and heading for places in the country. For reasons hard to understand, one guy from Tennessee led reporters on a tour of the bunker he’d built and stocked with food and weapons.
But among a vocal minority, the threat merely confirmed what they already knew. Fringe religious groups were positively apoplectic, had been since the first mention of the ship, whose location was still unknown. But for them, such details were inconsequential. The end was here and many of them rejoiced.
Already, authorities had discovered mass suicides by a number of cults with alien fixations and a lust for death, stirring up memories of Heaven’s Gate and Solar Temple. Thankfully, none so far had reached the fever-pitch numbers of Jonestown in ’78, although it was becoming abundantly clear that was only a question of time.
“I’m surprised it took this long for people to start losing their minds,” Tom said, folding his bottom lip into a frown and doing much the same with his arms. Humanity going to pieces was precisely the type of situation he’d been trying to avoid.
None of them were saying it, even though they knew it all the same. Sentinel had gotten its hands on the decoded message and was doing its best to spread the fear of an apocalypse across the airwaves.
“This is straight out of their playbook,” Tom explained, reading Mia’s mind. “But nimble as a group like Sentinel may be, it still takes time to get the message in the right hands and coordinate their plan of attack. Looks like your friend Ollie sold you down the river faster than we expected. He must be a real go-getter.”
Mia fought the bile surging up her throat. She had trusted Ollie and he had betrayed her just like Alan.
News of the alien threat was going to spread like a prairie fire on a dry summer’s day. Between the cable shows, Twitter and Facebook, nearly everyone with internet access would be discussing what to do and how long they had before the anticipated invasion. But after reading Lars’ research paper, rambling though it was at times, Mia was growing more and more certain the message they had plucked from pages of gibberish had been a mistake. Just as Armoni had so rightly pointed out, our brains were wired to see patterns. Jesus’ image on a piece of toast, the devil in the billows of smoke from the World Trade Center. For those eager to see them, the world was brimming with codes. Mia wasn’t eager at all. But even so, she was becoming more and more convinced that the real message hidden in Salzburg’s DNA had yet to be unlocked. With any luck, she was about to meet the one man who might just hold the key.
Chapter 50
After Jack’s rather surprising conversation with Rajesh, he and Dag continued to venture deeper into the bowels of the ship. As they descended, almost on a whim, Jack searched until he found the channel the Naval Intelligence officers were working on. He listened in as they proceeded to systematically cart away nearly everything the team had discovered. First came the bodies down in the autopsy room. Hart had told them about those. Next came the workshop where Gabby had found parts of what they suspected were escape pods. In a way, it was very much like watching the sacking of Constantinople, centuries’ worth of golden statues carted off for the sole purpose of melting them into coins. Only the creature incubating in the lab remained undetected, and perhaps only so because at least half of the ONI personnel were on the ship’s bridge, ogling either the symbols scrolling by on the holographic displays or Anna’s considerable ability to decipher what they meant.
It wouldn’t be long before Naval Intelligence stumbled upon the lab, confiscating the only living specimen on board along with the mysterious process that had jumpstarted its DNA after millions of years in suspended animation.
Dag was ahead of him now, no more than a few feet, when Jack decided he’d finally had enough of Captain Kelly and his merry band. He flipped back to channel two to find Gabby calling his name.
“Dag and I are trying to reach the ground level,” he told her. “See if we can’t find the engine to this thing.”
“The animal in the incubation tube,” she said, her voice distorted by her heavy breathing.
“The ONI men have it,” he said, jumping ahead. “Gabby, they’re taking everything, but don’t worry.” He tapped the sample kit still slung over his shoulder. “I kept some backups and I hope you did too.”
“No, Jack, it wasn’t them. The thing just disappeared.”
•••
They hurried at once back to the lab, the muscles in Jack’s legs burning nearly as much as his lungs. They arrived to find Eugene pacing by the entrance.
“Where’s Rajesh?” he asked, struggling to catch his breath.
“Still on the bridge,” Eugene said. “Trying to make sure no one messes with Anna.”
“I don’t blame him,” Dag added. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit to hear they meant to cart her away along with everything else.”
Jack went to the empty tube. “So what happened exactly?”
“It had grown nearly twice the size since you were last here,” Gabby began. “Eugene and I were here watching it slosh around.”
“It was moving?” Dag asked, amazed.
“Yeah,” Eugene replied. “And it was covered in fur. Next thing we knew a grate at the bottom of the incubation chamber opened up and drained all the fluid away. It was sitting there wet and confused. All of the sudden, it got sucked up through the top.” Eugene flung his arm up as if to demonstrate.
“What did it look like?” Jack asked.
He stuck his palms out, shaking them back and forth ever so slightly. “My background in zoology is very limited,” he said, pleading.
Dag, ever the paleontologist and movie nut, jumped in to help. “Did it look like something that might latch onto your face and lay eggs in your belly?”
Jack threw him a look.
“It had a long tail…” Gabby began to explain before fumbling with her glasses to send them a short snippet of video she’d taken.
Dag’s eyes went wide as he watched. “Call me crazy, but that looks a hell of a lot like a Plesiadapiformes.”
A light behind Jack’s eyes grew bright. “We need to find out where it went.” His gaze went to the top of the chamber and the black pipe which fed into a network of other ducts above. They each hurried in a different direction, following a spaghetti of twists and turns.
“The heck is a plesidapaformez?” Eugene said, butchering the word beyond repair.
Jack spotted a collection point high up where they all seemed to begin curving down toward the lower levels. He hurried for the nearest down-facing ramp, the sample kit on his waist clanking as he ran. The others followed suit. At the rear was Eugene still demanding an explanation.
•••
They stopped one level below the autopsy room. This was an area they had bypassed several times in their race to the bottom of the ship, where they hoped to find an engineering room and the source of the craft’s propulsion. Scanning the ceiling, Jack noticed how the pipes from the lab all seemed to converge on this floor.
The group pressed on with nothing but the ducts above to guide them.
“Maybe it got sucked into some kind of holding pen,” Dag suggested.
Soon they reached the central column of the elevator shaft. They circled the base until they found the archway to an area they hadn’t seen before. From inside, red, blue and green lights bled out, casting eerie shapes along the smooth metal surface. Cautiously, they passed over the threshold and stepped inside. Just like the tubes in the lab, here too were enclosures—pods really—arranged in rows, thirty-seven wide and an equal number deep. Same as the lab.
They came to a pod in the second row on the far left, the same position held by the incubation chamber with the Plesiadapiformes.
“There it is,” Gabby said.
Hazy tendrils of smoke da
nced inside the pod. Eugene drew closer right as the animal threw itself against the glass and let out a shriek. He recoiled and fell backwards.
“It’s gone insane,” Dag said.
“There’s enough room in there if you wanted to join him,” Gabby teased Eugene, who shrugged off the comment.
The animal was desperate to escape, but none of them were foolish enough to release it from captivity, even if they knew how.
A set of green holographic symbols shot out from a console next to the pod. The strange alien text rotated before them for less than sixty seconds before the room began to shake and the pod disappeared in a hail of swirling mist.
“Where’d it go?” Dag asked, shocked.
Jack raised a solitary finger. “Topside,” he said with certainty.
“Will someone for the love of God please tell me what’s so special about these plesi-things?” Eugene asked.
“It’s Plesiadapiformes,” Jack said, still absorbing the enormity of the situation. “A furry squirrel-like mammal with a long bushy tail that spent most of its time in trees.”
Eugene put his hands on his knees and shook his head in disbelief. “We ran all this way for that?”
“Not just that,” Jack explained, turning and heading back toward the ramp. “It also happens to be one of man’s earliest ancestors.”
Chapter 51
From the outside, Kopan Monastery looked more like a glittering Eastern palace than it did a place of worship. The temple featured five stories of fine, intricate craftsmanship, flanked on both sides by even taller pagoda-style towers and wide terraces. Groups of monks in saffron-colored robes shuffled toward a courtyard where a series of stupas were located. Stupas were large Buddhist shrines commemorating important monks or containing mantras, texts or other sacred relics.
Mia stopped a young monk to ask him what was happening. He smiled and bowed slightly, but said nothing.
An older monk spotted them and approached.
“I’m sorry, but the trapas are forbidden from speaking at the moment.”
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