The discussion turned to the question of how to proceed when they arrived at their destination. Cort tried to arrange for Agency assets from Texas and California to be sent in ahead of them, but the remote location confounded those efforts. He contacted the military, but was tight-lipped about the full results of that conversation, saying only that there would be no additional boots on the ground, meaning that the little group in the Gulfstream would be the sole defenders of the human race. If they failed, it would be game over.
“What should we expect?” Cort asked.
Soter turned to Jenna.
“How should I know?” she snapped, but then she realized why he had deferred to her. If anyone could predict what the clones would do, it would be her. Yet the truth was that she didn’t know. The door to the implanted memories remained shut. The only thing she really knew for sure was that the urge to go to the coordinates in the message was overpowering. Even now, with the memories ripped from her head, Jenna felt the irresistible urge. The other clones surely felt it, too. She wondered how many were on their way there? She did not share this insight with Cort, though, and he noticed the omission.
“I signed off on this little field trip because you insisted that only you could stop them,” he reminded her.
“I’ll understand it better when I get there,” she said.
They were nearly at their destination, and she still had no idea what was going to happen.
After landing, they headed out from Socorro on US Route 60. Noah was at the wheel of their rented Jeep Cherokee, maintaining a steady seventy-five miles per hour. Cort sat in the front passenger seat. Soter and Jenna were in the back. She could see distant mountain ranges on the horizon, but the foreground was flat and desolate. Florida was flat, but at least there were palm trees to break up the monotony. Here, there was nothing except the occasional herd of cattle, and—distant but growing ever larger—an irregular line of satellite dishes.
As they approached, Jenna began to appreciate just how extraordinary the Very Large Array was. Unlike the Arecibo Observatory, which made use of a single enormous dish, more or less fixed in place, the Very Large Array’s twenty-seven individual dishes—each more than eighty feet in diameter and arranged in a Y-shaped pattern with legs that extended more than thirteen miles in each direction—worked in unison to create a single antenna that could be extended to a maximum twenty-two miles across. A tourist brochure she had picked up in Socorro described how the 230-ton dishes could be moved as needed using a special transport vehicle running on railroad tracks that extended to the Y’s full limit.
As the full scope of the observatory came into view, Cort looked back at Jenna. “Why does it have to be here? Couldn’t this signal be sent from any radio telescope?”
Soter answered before Jenna could admit her ignorance. “We can only speculate about the reason, but my hypothesis is that the intelligence behind the message was very familiar with our capabilities and our potential. In 1977, when the Wow! Signal and the transmission I later received were sent, the VLA was the best radio telescope on Earth. The author of the transmission could expect that it would still be functioning thirty-seven years later. The same cannot be said for the Big Ear telescope, which received the Wow! Signal. It was dismantled in 1998 to make room for a golf course.”
“A golf course?” Noah echoed, glancing in the rear view mirror. “You’re kidding, right?”
Soter grimaced. “I wish I were. One would expect a better fate for the place that marks the first contact by an alien intelligence.”
Cort gave a sarcastic chuckle. “Maybe someday they’ll build a war memorial there.”
Nobody had a response to that.
57
5:31 p.m.
The VLA dishes grew larger until they stretched across half the horizon like a picket line. A rough map on the tourist pamphlet revealed that the highway passed through the upper leg of the array. Just before they reached it, Noah turned off the main route and headed toward the cluster of administrative buildings near the junction of the three legs. He drove past the visitors center—the parking lot was empty—and continued to the control building, a two story concrete and stone structure.
Jenna was struck by the profound differences between the VLA facility and the Arecibo Observatory. The landscape was open and featureless, unlike the lushly forested limestone hills in Puerto Rico. The buildings reminded her more of the structures she’d glimpsed at the abandoned Aerojet facility in the Everglades—big, open and scattered across the landscape. The enormous dishes sprouted from the plain like surreal white mushrooms in a Lewis Carrroll story. Strangest of all was the profound quiet.
“Sure doesn’t look like anything is about to happen,” Cort remarked, taking out his cell phone and glancing at the display. “Less than half an hour to go. I’m guessing you don’t just walk into a place like this and say ‘I’d like to place a collect call to the Andromeda galaxy.’”
Soter shook his head. “Scientists have to schedule their research months, even years in advance. And this facility is primarily a receiving station.”
“You mean it can’t be used to call out?”
“It can. There’s no fundamental difference between a transmitter and a receiver in terms of hardware. A transmitter like the one at Arecibo, is built to sustain a high-power transmission over long periods. A transmission sent from here wouldn’t be very powerful at all, but the focusing ability of the array would compensate for that. However, making the changes would require some technical knowledge.”
“Do any of your clones have that knowledge?”
This wasn’t the first time the subject had been brought up, but Soter’s answer was the same. “To the best of my knowledge, no.”
“Well, we’re here. I guess we should go and make sure nobody snuck in the back door.”
As they headed in through the main entrance, Jenna hung back, allowing the three men to take the lead. The urge to make this journey, that she had first experienced in Puerto Rico, had not relented, but she felt no sense of familiarity or attunement with this place. No new implanted memories had been awakened in her. She couldn’t tell whether the door to those memories had been shut or there was simply nothing there in the first place.
Signs for the self-guided walking tour pointed the way to the control room. Like the Arecibo Observatory, the room looked more like an office than a portal for watching distant stars. More than a dozen computers and monitors, each one displaying a graph or lines of text, sat atop a long horse-shoe shaped desk wrapped around the room’s perimeter. Anyone hoping to see spectacular pictures of black holes or nebulae would have gone away disappointed.
Three men were working in the room, hunched over their workstations, busily entering data. One of them looked up and offered a friendly wave, then went back to his task. The others ignored them.
Cort cleared his throat. “I need to speak to whomever is in charge.”
All three men looked up, and Jenna heard one of them groan. She scanned the faces—all were middle-aged Caucasian men. None of them bore even a passing resemblance to her. The man who had waved rose from his seat and came over to speak with them. He eyed Cort’s crutches—Jenna could almost see him leaping to the conclusion that they were going to complain about the ‘walking’ part of the walking tour, but he kept his smile in place as he introduced himself.
“I’m Dr. Jon Miller. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Are you in charge?” Cort asked. Jenna noted that he was being aggressive to the point of rudeness, asserting his dominance to ensure cooperation. It was one of the techniques Noah had taught her, but not one that she had ever practiced. In her experience, subtlety produced better results.
The smile slipped a little but Miller remained diplomatic. “Well, I’m in charge of a few things. If you tell me your concerns, I’ll have a better idea where to direct you.”
“We’re federal officers, investigating a possible threat against this facility.”
The news hit Miller like a bomb. The other two men sat up straighter, appearing almost poised to flee. “A threat? I…uh, can’t imagine what kind of…uh…”
Cort allowed the tension to build a moment, then his demeanor changed completely. “It’s probably nothing, but I’d appreciate it if you could go over a couple of things with us. Just to be sure.”
Miller swallowed. “Sure.”
Soter stepped forward. “Would you please show us the scheduled activity for the next twenty-four hours?”
Miller nodded and gestured to a laptop computer that was already displaying a spreadsheet. Soter scanned the document, scrolling down, then looked back and shrugged.
Cort addressed Miller again. “How easy would it be to change the orientation of the array to send a transmission?”
Miller gave a surprised laugh, but then he became somber again when he realized Cort was not joking. “Not easy at all. In the first place, we’re a receiving station. And we don’t change the schedule for just anyone.”
“You’re not hearing me, doc.” A little of the earlier surliness was back. “If someone came in here, pointed a gun at your head and told you to do it, how tough would it be to make the changes?”
Miller went pale. “Uh…is that what you are—”
“No. Just answer the question.”
“We could do it from this room. It would take a few minutes.”
Cort turned away as if Miller no longer existed and addressed Noah and Jenna. “That’s it then. All we need to do is secure this room and there’s no way that signal is going out. Not from here at least.”
Jenna did not share Cort’s certitude, but before she could offer a rebuttal, she noticed Miller staring at her. She felt a sudden rush of apprehension and took a quick step forward. “Dr. Miller. You recognize me, don’t you?”
He shook his head, embarrassed at having been caught. “No. I’m sorry.”
“Dr. Miller, this is important. Do I look like someone that you know?”
He feigned ignorance a moment longer before admitting, “You could be her twin sister.”
Cort was quick to grasp the importance of this revelation. “Who? Someone that works here? One of the astronomers?”
“Sophie isn’t an astronomer. She’s with the track maintenance team.”
“Sophia Gallo?” Soter asked.
“I…ah, don’t know her last name.”
Soter turned to the others. “Sophia is from Generation Six, the same as Jarrod and Kelli.”
“Wonderful,” Cort growled. “Track maintenance. That explains how we missed her. We were looking for brainiacs. Is she here right now?”
Miller shrugged.
“We’re going to have to sweep the entire site,” Cort said, directing his words to Noah.
Jenna knew that was no small undertaking. There was a lot of ground to cover, half a dozen buildings, and if the array itself was included, twenty-seven antenna dishes sprawled out on nearly forty miles of railroad track.
Noah nodded then turned to Jenna. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we brought you along after all.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the other men called out. “Dr. Miller? Something is happening to the array.”
“What the hell?” Miller looked at the spreadsheet again. “There aren’t any adjustments scheduled.”
“Shut it down,” Cort ordered.
Miller and the other two men crowded around a different terminal and began tapping in commands, but after a few seconds, it was apparent that the array was not responding to their efforts. Jenna looked past them and out the large window, gazing out across the array. Even from a distance, she could see the inverted domes moving, swinging around and tilting toward a different part of the sky. It was beautiful to watch: a perfectly synchronized dance that ended only when all twenty-seven dishes were aimed at a group of stars known as Chi Sagittarii.
58
6:00 p.m.
Jenna felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Noah, standing close. Protective. “You were right,” he whispered. “Is there anything you can do?”
She looked back, uncertain. A sense of satisfaction filled her. Everything was playing out according to the plan that had been written in her DNA. She didn’t need to do anything. Yet her rational mind knew that the feeling was a lie. It was wrong. She didn’t want the message to be sent. Didn’t want the world and everyone she loved to be swept away in a global apocalypse.
Cort was still trying to get a grasp on what was happening. “Can this be done remotely? Is there an alternate control room?”
Miller shook his head. “The computer controls the array, but we’re locked out.”
“It’s Chu,” Jenna whispered. “He’s taken over the network.”
Cort stared at her a moment, processing this, then turned to Miller. “Is that possible?”
Miller raised his hands in a gesture that indicated he was out of his depth. “I wouldn’t have thought any of this was possible, but yes. If somebody broke into our network, they could take control of the array.”
“So he could be anywhere. Timbuktu, for all we know.”
“He’s here,” Jenna said, still whispering, though she didn’t know why. “He’s with Sophia. They’re here somewhere. They have to be.”
One of the other technicians spoke up. “If you wanted to take over the network on site, the best way to do it would be to splice into one of the fiber optic lines.”
“Where are those?”
“Everywhere. But the antennas would be the ideal place. Or the pads. There are nodes at each one.”
Cort breathed a curse. “Can you pull the plug? Shut down everything?”
“We’re locked out,” Miller repeated.
“Then cut the damn cord with an axe!” The scientist looked aghast at the suggestion, so Cort continued, “I’ll do it. Show me where.”
“Too late,” Jenna murmured. She wasn’t sure how she knew this. It didn’t feel like an implanted memory. It might have been nothing more than a sense of imminent defeat, but she was certain that the message was already being transmitted. If it was as simple as the Wow! Signal, it might already be done. If it was something more complex, like the DNA transmission, it would take longer, but certainly no more than a few minutes. And then…?
Then Jarrod Chu would signal the rest of the clones scattered around the world to start tipping the dominos.
This is the way it’s supposed to happen.
This time, there was no mistaking the source of the thought. Her voice—the teacher’s voice—still with her.
No! I won’t do this. I won’t stand by and let everything be destroyed. I didn’t get this far by giving up.
She closed her eyes and tried to reach out with her mind. She had always heard that twins shared a strange, almost psychic bond. Maybe clones did, too. She envisioned Jarrod Chu, bent over a computer, watching as the message was uploaded. Was it a vision—was she seeing it through his eyes because of some psychic bond—or just her imagination? Either way, it didn’t help. She tried to picture Sophia Gallo, someone she had never even heard of until sixty seconds before, yet with whom she shared a unique blueprint. What was she doing right now?
Track maintenance.
After the antennas, the most critical component of the Very Large Array was the rail line, which made it possible to move the massive dishes to different positions along the legs of the Y. Ensuring that the two hundred ton dishes could be moved without incident required the forty miles of steel rail and over sixty thousand wooden railroad ties. Maintaining all that required specialized equipment and unique vehicles.
Cort dug into his pocket and pulled out a phone. He tapped a contact name and strolled a few feet away, his back to them, his voice hushed, but urgent.
With Cort distracted, Jenna whirled to face Noah. “I can find them. Give me the keys.”
She said it so forcefully that Noah dug into his pocket for the keys, but the gravity of her
demand hit him before he could hand them over. He gave her a crooked smile. “Sorry. The rental agreement doesn’t allow that. But I’ll drive you.”
For just an instant, Jenna was grateful for his support. Then a chill, like a premonition of death, shot down her spine.
Just you.
She shook her head. “I can’t explain why, but I have to do this alone. You asked if there was anything I can do. This is it. Please trust me.”
His smile fell, replaced by an intense stare that cut right to her core. “Jenna...”
“Trust me,” she repeated, then added a word that seemed strange in her mouth. “Dad.”
“I trust you,” he said, barely louder than a whisper. He held out the keys, but as she took them, he said, “Remember, Jenna. Nurture is more powerful than nature. I raised you well.”
As she bolted from the room, she heard Cort shouting, “Where the hell is she going? In ten minutes, this place will be—” The door shut, cutting off his voice.
In ten minutes, what?
Doesn’t matter, she decided, and she ran faster.
59
6:03 p.m.
Noah’s words haunted her as she sprinted toward the parked Jeep. He had seen through her. He had seen something that even she couldn’t see. She was being summoned—drawn by a siren song that rang out from every cell in her body—to a reckoning where she would discover whether he was right.
Stop it? Why?
She slid behind the wheel and started the SUV. The track maintenance yard was just three hundred feet away, easily identifiable by the collection of strange looking vehicles, many of which sat on rail sidings. Two men in hard hats and work clothes stood near one of the vehicles and she steered toward them, rolling down the window as she skidded to a stop.
“Where’s Sophia?”
One of the men glanced up, a perturbed expression on his face. “You shouldn’t be driving in here.”
Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) Page 28